HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER

Volume I, Number 1 January, 1979

Herewith we inaugurate a newsletter which will come to you in January, April, July, and October. Your sugges tions and contributions will be welcomed; send them to Muriel Beadle at 1700 E. 56th St., Apt. 401, Chicago 60637. The deadline for ach issue is the 10th of the month pre ceding publication.

HYDr rA K SOClfil NOTE5

On August 15, 1 75, the Chi cago Tribune described a fete given by the ladies of St.

Paul's Church. It was atten ded by about 390 persons,and lighted by locomotive search lights and Chinese lanterns.

On Saturday, January 27,1979 the Hyde Park Historical Society will have its annual meeting--a dinner at the Win dermere Hotel. There are no plans to light the scene with anything more exotic than candles. For further details of the event, see p.3 of this newsletter.

Now is the time to renew your Hyde Park Historical Society mem bership, the best buy in Chicago because our dues are 1) low and 2) cover all members of a family. Send your check for $5 to Mrs.

John Davey, 5748 S. Harper,60637.

JANUARY MEETING FOCUSES ON FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

From Jan. 10 to Feb. 25, "The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright", a Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition, will be on display at the David and Alfred Smart Gallery, 5550 S. Greenwood. (Tues.-Sat.,

10 AM to 4 PM; Sun., noon to 4 PM.)

Hyde Park Historical Society Board member Irma Strauss assisted David Hanks, the Smithsonian's Curator of Decorative Arts, in lo cating obj_ects and researching their history.

She says, "All his interior de tails--furniture, lamp shades, rugs, windows, and at times fabrics, cer amics, silverware and even dresses of his clients--were designed to complete the architecture. Since most of his interiors have been des troyed or altered, it is only by viewing the objects in this exhibit along with photographs of the origi nal architecture that his work can be properly understood." --2

The Winter Sporting Scene, circa 1912

With our purchase of the old Chicago City Railway Co. sta tion at 5529 Lake Park Ave., people are becoming curious about cable car days in Hyde Park. Gerhardt Laves, who was born here in 1906, recalls how his older brother Ulrich enjoyed exhilar

ting sled rides down 55th St.,with the help of the cable car machinery.

This is how it was done: Ulrich would position his sled in the middle of the street, directly above the sunken cable which was constantly in motion thanks to the power house at 55th St. and Cottage Grove Ave. He would then reach down into the slot, grab the c ble, and off he'd go!

These adventures were less dangerous than they seemed, Gerhardt says, for the horses pulling other vehicles shied away from the boy on the sled; and following cable cars, being attached to the same cable and traveling at the same speed, never overtook him.

\\ IGHT•••. from page 1 1978 IN REVIEW

On January 17, Mrs. Strauss will give an illustrated lecture, "Frank Lloyd Wright and Hyde Park Kenwood". Time: ts PM. Place: KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation, 5039

S. Greenwood Ave. The program will be co-sponsored by the Hyde Park Historical Society, the KAM-Isaiah Israel Sisterhood, and the Victor ian Society, Chicago Chapter.

Renovation Trade Fair Planned

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, in cooperation with the city of Chicago, is planning an exposition called "City House: A Marketplace of Renovation Ideas for Old.Houses." Scheduled for February at Navy Pier, this exhib it will feature preservation mat erials, skills, and information sources for home owners seeking to renovate older city dwellings.

Our programs were distin guished by their quality and their variety. Special thanks to Thelma Dahlberg, program chairman, for her fine arrangements. Here's a brief review:

Jan. 29: Arthur Weinberg on "Clarence Darrow As a Literary Figure", at the United Church of Hyde Park. A fresh approach to the biography of a famous lawyer and Hyde Park resident.

Mar. 14: A report on the status of proposals to designate parts of the community as Chicago historic districts or to list them on the National Register.Speakers: Robert Wagner of Illinois Dept. of Conservation, our own Board mem bers Dev Bowly and Michael Conzen. An exceptionally large and keenly interested crowd attended. At International House.

QUALITY AND VARIETY CHARACTERIZED THE SOCIETY'S 1978 ACTIVITIES

...... from page 2

April 30: Mini-tour of KAM Isaiah Israel Temple, with Irma Strauss as our tour guide.

June 3 and 4: Members manned a booth across the street from the 57th St. Art Fair, distributed lit erature about the Society, sold pub lications, enrolled new members.

July 4: Excursion by bus to the traditional Fourth of July celebration at the Chicago Histor ical Society, preceded by juice and doughnuts and a quick look

at our just-acquired headquarters building (of which, more elsewhere in this newsletter).

Sept. 17: Excursion by bus--in fact, by three buses--to "Sunday

on Prairie Avenue, 1893", the offi cial opening of the Prairie Avenue Historic District. Most popular attraction: that modern rarity, an organ grinder man, complete with monkey.

Oct. 29: Sunday afternoon sher ry reception for Paul A. Cornell and other HPHS Charter Members1in

Fellowship Hall at the United Church

of Hyde Park. Speech by Mr. Cornell about his grandfather, the Paul Cor nell who founded Hyde Park. At the following social hour, descendants of early Hyde Park families were welcomed as special guests.

Nov.11: Acting President Jean Block autographed copies of her

much-praised book, Hyde Park Houses, at Hyde Park Federal Savings, a por tion of each sale going to the Hyde Park Historical Society. Our thanks to the Universjty of Chicago Press and to Hyde Park Federal.

Dec. 10: Another workout for Jean Block--this time at the Uni versity Church of the Disciples, where she spoke to the topic, "Re searching Your House." For one bit of her advice, and a request, see the next page.

------------------------ti"'- - - - - - - - - - - -

ANNUAL MEETING & Dinner I

AT WIND[RMERE HOTEL ON JANUARY 27

By the end of January, John Vinci will have completed his proposal for the renovation of our headquarters, the old cable car station at 5529 Lake Park. At the annual meeting, Dev Bowly will present a detailed re port and show sketches. There will also be entertainment before and af ter dinner, and a cash bar.

Date: Saturday, Jan. 27. Place: Windermere Hotel. Time: 6:30 PM.

Mr. Thomas J. Pavelec 5539 S. Cornell Ave.

Chicago, Il 60637

I will attend the HPHS annu al meeting and dinner on Jan.

27 at the Windermere Hotel. Please reserve places at $10 each. My check,drawn to the Hyde Park Historical Society, is enclosed.

Name

Cost: $10 per person. Guests are welcome. Use form at right.

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ClHSM: Organized Swap Shop

The Hyde Park Historical Soci ety belongs to the Congress of Illinois Historical Societies and Museums (CIHSM). This organization is sponsored by the Illinois State Historical Society in order to "facilitate the exchange of ideas, methods and solutions to mutual problem,s11 among the 135 local historical societies in Illinois who are members. Region al and state meetings are held frequently.

A newsletter, Historically Speaking, is published quarterly. Membership in CIHSM also includes subscriptions to two publications of the Illinois State Historical Society. We expect to print occa si_onal excerpts from these sources.

DO YOU HAVE•. ?

Many Hyde Parkers have old title searches and architectural drawings of their houses. These, Jean Block says, should remain with the houses. But the HPHS would like to know of the existence of such material. Will you tell us what you have? Write Mrs. Samuel Block, 1700 E. 56th St., Chi cago 60637.

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N w Il att IT

Volume I, Number 2 April, 1979

Committee Organized to Save Rosenwald House

Whether by accident or a confluence of subliminal forces, the forma tion of the Hyde Park Historical Society preceded by only a few months a move on the part of the Chicago Landmarks Commission to make Kenwood a Landmark District and the nomination of Hyde Park-Kenwood for recognition

by the National Register· f Histor ic Places.

Under these circumstances, the

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The date was January 27. The place was the Windermere Hotel. The weather was terrible. Yet al

most 200 people attended our annual meeting and dinner-and enjoyed it greatly.

In her welcome, President Jean Block said, "Recently there was a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker depicting the usual lanky couple conversing over martinis. The wife says to the husband, 'I'd like to join the historical society, but I don't know if I want to be that kind of person.'

"If you look around this room, you will see that she wouldn't have that problem here. There isn't a Hyde Park Historical Society 'type.' In our membership we have all ages; renters and home owners; old-timers and newcomers: a cross-section that truly represents the diversity upon which Hyde Park prides itself "

This is undoubtedly why so many people later praised the "family

original objectives of the Society

-to record Hyde Park's history, to preserve selected documents and artifacts, to promote public inter est in Hyde Park and its history, and to educate and involve individ uals and groups in an appreciation and understanding of its heritage take on a new and larger meaning.

One of the "artifacts" we are eager to preserve is the Rosenwald House at 4901 Ellis, now threaten ed with demolition if neither a single family nor an institutional purchaser can be found. The house, by Nimmons and Fellows, is an im portant example of Prairie School architecture, a unique element of our Midwestern heritage. Its own er was one of Chicago's great citi zens, a gifted businessman and en lightened reformer and philanthro pist. Julius Rosenwald contributed generously to the University of Chicago, Jewish philanthropies, Hull House, and many other organi zations. The Museum of ... top. 4

feeling" of the evening....top. 3

The State of the Station

VINCI PROVIDES RESTORATION PLAN FOR OUR HEADQUARTERS

By Devereux Bowly, Jr.

The Hyde Park Historical Society

has been demolished above the roof line, must be rebuilt. Most of the millwork must be replaced. The tongue and groove paneling on the interior walls and ceiling will be restored

or replaced. The office of the Soci ety will be located in what was once

the station master's office, at the

headquarters, 5529 S. Lake Park Ave., was constructed in 1893 or 1894 by the Chicago City Street Railway, once the most extensive cable car system in the country. The building later served the trolley system and in rel atively recent memory housed a tiny lunch counter.

Last fall, the well-known preser vation architect John Vinci was hired to prepare a set of measured drawings of the building as well as a plan for its restoration. A grant from the National Trust for Historic Preser vation covered half his fee. His re port and drawings are now complete.

Here's a summary of the plan:

north end of the building. It will have a pullman kitchen and a reno vated washroom.

The rest of the space will be out fitted as a station waiting room. It will have movable wooden benches, which can be supplemented for meet ings by folding chairs, a wood-burn ing stove, ticket window openings, a sales stand, and facilities for dis play of historical material.

The building cost the Society

$4,000. More than $10,000 was raised by the sale of Charter memberships. Architect Vinci estimates that the renovation will cost $50 per square foot, or a total of about $40,000.

This figure assumes that some of the

Because no original plans or early work will be done by Society volun- photographs of the building exist (so teers. Unfortunately, however, most far as is known) and the interior has of the needed work cannot be done by been extensively altered, it will be amateurs.

impossible to restore the building

exactly as it was built. What will be It is hoped that most or all of done, however, is to create an authen-the $40,000 can be obtained from

tic railroad station appeara ce as Chicago-area foundations or corpora- of the late 19th century, w ile t tions, and a fund drive is in pro- the same time adapting the interior gress under the direction of Board to the uses of our Society. member Clyde Watkins, Director of

The building's exterior dimensions are 20 by 40 ft. The chimney, which

May 6: At the DuSable Museum of Afro American History, Dina Epstein and Ruth Fouch will speak on "Myths of Black Music."

May 19: A natural history tour of Wooded Island, with Douglas Anderson.

Development of the University of Chi cago. Depending on the success of the fund drive, construction is an- ticipated for the summer of 1979 or for 1980.

Details later

"City House" Advice: Think it Through, Do it Well

By Lesley Bloch

Twenty thousand people made their way to Navy Pier on the weekend of Feb. 16-18 for "City House", the ex hibit sponsored by the Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectur al Landmarks and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Passing up the popcorn and the hotdogs for gathering free brochures from many of the 99 exhibitors, I spent 2 1/2 hours listening, watch ing and walking. Looking over the

To reinforce the impact of this lecture there was a display of page enlargements from an upcoming book, City House Guide, which tells the correct way to make many home im provements on older buildings.(Call Commission on Landmarks, 744-3200, for price and publication date.)

With new thoughts on restoring our front door to its original hand someness and getting rid of the storm door, I took my enthusiasm home to our city house.

contents of my free "Make Chicago Great" shopping bag, I found infor

mation on shutter dealers, salvage

companies, subscription forms for Old House Journal and the Time-Life Handyman series, information on se curity in the home, near the home, in the car and for the senior citi zen as well as passouts from the neighborhoods of the Highlands, Ken wood, Wicker Park, Pullman, etc.

With a list of all the exhibitors and their phone numbers I now have a ready source for any household improvement or problem.

Lectures were scheduled through out the weekend. Among those I at tended was Harry Hunderman's "Re storing the Historic Details of Your Home's Exterior." He says that

you should THINK before you ruin your house by tearing down, replac ing, repositioning or restoring bad ly. He showed slides of interesting houses which had become less so by the addition of aluminum siding, plastic awnings, glass bricks, etc.

This newsletter is published quarterly. Editor, Muriel Beadle. Typing, Corinne Seither. Graphics, Michael Conzen.

ANNUAL MEETING.... from p. 1

In addition to Irma Strauss's slide show, the President's Report, and the presentation of the first annual Paul Cornell awards, Dever eux Bowly brought us up to date on restoration plans for our headquar ters. (His report appears on p. 2.)

The songs and skits which fol lowed dinner were, as Ned Rosen heim said, "a reminder of the local tradition of amateur theatricals, those labors of love by writers, producers, directors and performers who make their livings in every pos sible colorful Hyde Park way except the professional theater."

The songs "Oscar" and "Abe" came respectively from the 1963 Harper Court benefit and the 1958 Revels. The song "In Old Hyde Park" and two monologues--"A Voice from the Past" and "Are You There?"--were written for this occasion. Performers were Helen and Roland Bailey, Pat Bil lingsley, Mary Schulman, Stephen Thomas and Impresario Rosenheim.

P.S. It would be a worthy HPHS project to collect memorabilia of the amateur theatricals that have flourished here. Anyone interested?

J. DARTER HAPPY HERE

By Malcolm Collier

How many kinds of fish are there in the Jackson Park lagoons? Ask David Gordon, who spoke Feb.22 at the Black stone Branch Library on the ecology of the lagoons during the past century.

Gordon is on a work-study program at the Field Museum, is a research assis tant at the Shedd Aquarium and a stu dent of the lagoon fish population and bottom sediments.

He said there are now about 15 spe cies of fish in the lagoons. Among them are the tiny Johnny Darter andthe yellow perch, whose presence indicates that these waters are reasonably health y despite the loss of two feet of depth during the past decade and other hazards.

ROSENWALD.... from p. 1

Science and Industry is a constant reminder of his dedication to the city and its people. He espoused the cause of black education long before others became aware of this need.

The loss of this house would greatly reduce the aesthetic and historic value of the neighborhood. A group of concerned residents is working to prevent this from hap pening. You can join them by con tacting Victoria Post Ranney, 4919 Woodlawn Ave., 548-0017.

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Volume I, Number 3 July, 1979

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JOYCE FOUNDATION GRANT

The campaign to raise the money necessary for the renovation of the Hyde Park Historical Society head quarters, the 19th century cable car station at 5529 Lake Park Ave., is going forward.

To date our efforts have been re warded with a $2500 grant from The Joyce Foundation. Proposals are be ing sent to other foundations, and fund-raising activity will continue

throughout the summer. o

Henry Who?

PUNNY PARTIES HONOR NOVELIST FULLER

By Mary Hynes-Berry

Early this year, the Committee for Fuller Recognition of the De servedly Obscure sent out invita tions to honor the 122nd birthday (Jan. 9) of Henry Blake Fuller, the mildly well-known Chicago au thor and Hyde Park resident. The appointed night (Jan.13) came, along with the Blizzard of '79 and 40 guests.

This was the third birthday par ty given by my husband and me since we discovered that, 50 years ago this summer, Fuller died of a heart attack in a room he rented in our house. Before happening by chance on this information, we had never heard of Fuller. Since then, we have learned a lot.

One delightful source, which we acquired, is a 1927 letter from Ful ler to Mrs. Lorado Taft. In it, he mentions moving to 5411 So. Harper Ave., with "Mrs. Ryan, but American" as his landlady.

After reading all the way through some of his eight novels (including the two he wrote in our upstairs bed room), we decided that Fuller was

.... to page 2

GUEST OF HONOR'S GHOST HASN'T YET MANIFESTED ITSELF

Continued from previous page

a competent not brilliant writer

of some historical interest. It was

One faction argued heatedly that the man who wrote the first realis tic novel with Chicago as its set ting (With the Procession), who wrote

exciting to discover that one's house another which became the name of a

had had a brush with history. It was somehow realistic to learn that the brush was-like life is so of ten-of passionate interest to those involved and forgotten by everyone else.

The most appropriate reaction was to celebrate the Deservedly

Obscure. Although Henry was a notor

iously shy bachelor, there was al ways the off-chance that his ghost might join in the festivities. But, alas, Henry didn't manifest himself at the first party. Nor, at the sec ond, did he attend the premiere per formance of a hitherto undiscovered manuscript entitled The Brushman Cometh (which bore a remarkable textual resemblance to the letter

in the Berrys' possession).

It was on the agenda of this year's gathering to decide if Ful ler should be promoted to the sta tus of Free Spirit. The title is granted to only the most deserved ly obscure. So, once the evening had sufficiently progressed, the group was asked to debate before voting a recommendation to the

Powers-That-Be. Debate they did.

famous club (The Cliff Dwellers), who was admired by such writers and critics as Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser and Edmund Wilson, who great ly aided Harriet Monroe in the edi torial work of Poetry magazine, and who counted Lorado Taft as a close friend--such a man did not deserve obscurity.

Others argued that perhaps ob scurity was deserved when academics who had devoted their careers to the man made comments like: "Whenever

a critic needed another example of arrested literary development, all he had to do was to point to Henry

B. haunting the fringes of literary recognition." (Charles Silet)

Still a third set pointed out that the previous birthday parties had ser iously threatened Fuller's obscurity, no matter how well deserved.

The secret ballots were counted. A majority had voted to make Henry a Free Spirit. Even so, when the lights were dimmed and the 122 candles lit, Henry still didn't feel free to waft down the stairs and blow them out.

Maybe next year □

r---=::::::::::::::=---,

AT SPRINGFIELD -

At 9 PM every evening except Mondays until September 8 (weather

2- permitting), "Sound and Light at the Old State Capitol" will be pre-

;@ sented free of charge at the handsomely restored Old State Capitol

building in Springfield. The 45-min. electronic production, now in

J its fourth season, was narrated by the late Lee J. Cobb and focuses i

i on the fateful issues facing Abraham Lincoln and the nation in 1860. i

2,. "Your Obedient Servant, A. Lincoln" is also in its fourth season

@ at Kelso Hollow Theater in New Salem. The play is presented nightly except Mondays through August 25. For ticket information, write The

.· Great American People Show, Box 401, Petersburg, IL 62675, or tele- phone 217-632-7755. □

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CALL FOR GIFTS!

Many libraries

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By Victor Dyer

What sort of historical materials should community libraries or his torical societies collect? What should the relationship be between historical society and library, es pecially when the one collects and the other stores the material?

At a May 16 conference on local history, sponsored by the Chicago Historical Society, speakers in cluded Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, Assistant Archivist in the Special Collections Division of the Chi cago Public Library.

She reported that 15 major his torical collections-most of them dating from the 1930's-are now housed in branch libraries. Typ ically, these collections origi nated with neighborhood historical societies, some of which have gone out of existence. (The Woodlawn Historical Society is an example.)

Ms. Schoelwer's remarks stimu lated a lively discussion of pub lic library/historical society relationships and obligations. It was evident that clear guidelines are necessary, with special at tention given to the disposal of collections if a historical soci ety should become defunct.

Information and ideas from this conference will aid the Hyde Park Historical Society Board of Di rectors in planning our acquisi tions policies. The Acquisitions Committee (Jean Block, Kathleen Conzen, Victor Dyer and Albert

.... to page 6

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According to the Hyde Park ► Herald, "Presents included an ► upright piano, an elegant oak ► cabinet, a hammered wood hod, ► an oriental water pitcher, a ► decorated French butter dish, ► cut glass and Bohemian glass ► fruit dishes, an embroidered ► piano cover, a French mantel ► clock and a rocking chair." ►

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Rosenwald

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Efforts to save the historic and architecturally significant Julius Rosenwald house at 4901 Ellis Ave. have gained momentum in recent months.

Representatives of the Committee to Save the Rosenwald House have met with Fourth Ward Alderman Ti othy C. Evans, Kenwood community leaders and the owner of the property.

The committee has widely distrib uted a statement contending that the only economically feasible way to preserve the building is to permit it to be sold as three condominium units, one on each floor.

To date, 770 people, more than

270 of whom live in the immediate vi cinity of the Rosenwald house, have endorsed the statement and joined

the committee. If you would like to do likewise, send your name and ad dress on a postcard to the head of the committee, Victoria Post Ranney, 4915 Woodlawn Ave.

.... to page 7

Early Black Music in U.S. did have Roots in Africa

By Muriel Beadle

"The break from their African cultures was so abrupt and so complete that slaves who were brought to the United States were in effect without any culture. White society, especially missionaries, was the source of whatever music they later developed." True or false? FALSE.

On May 6, members of the Hyde Park Historical Society hea d Dena Ep stein, music librarian at Regenstein Library, and Ruth Fouche, ethnol ogist at the DuSable Museum of Afro-American History, discuss "Myths of Black Music." Our thanks to both for an enlightening presentation.

Our speakers said that the erroneous statement above derives from the fact that incoming slaves had no common languages. What they did have,

however, were mutually comprehen

0 tempora! 0 mores!

Two delightful excerpts from "A Hyde Park Childhood," by Dor othy Michelson Livingston, who is a daughter of the great physicist Albert A. Michelson:

"We children attended the Lab oratory School,[which] was called the University Elementary School when I entered there for first grade in 1912. We were taught the nursery rhymes in Latin, and in sixty-eight years I have not

forgotten: Domina Maria, tota con traria/Quibiti crescit in horto?"

"My sisters and I were taken to hear Frederic Stock conduct the Thomas concerts at Orchestra Hall. We saw Pavlova do her famous 'Dy ing Swan'. We heard Galli-Curci sing and saw Joseph Schildkraut play in 'Lilliam'. But my person al taste was for a more vulgar form of entertainment. Whenever possible I escaped to the Frolic Movie House on Fifty-fifth Street, where for ten cents I saw hero William S. Hart rescue maiden Blanche Sweet from the villain..."

--from the University of Chicago

Alumni Magazine, Winter Quarter 179

sible tonal systems. They also had the traditional musical instruments of their homelands-cannily provi ded by slave traders to encourage dancing by their human cargo during the long sea voyage. The slaves arrived in better condition if they exercised enroute.

Nor did spirituals make up the bulk of the slaves' later American music. They also had secular music, the "sinful tunes" in the title of Dena Epstein's recent book, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (University of Illinois Press). Until recently, the existence of such music during the antebellum years was so poorly

documented that Mrs. Epstein's book is being highly praised by·other ex perts in her field.

Its site added additional interest to the May 6 meeting. At the turn of the century, when Washington Park was one of the jewels of the Chicago Park District, the building that is now the DuSable Museum was the park's Administration Building.

It overlooked a sunken garden, of which only the formal pathways and edging balustrades remain today.

There is no trace at all of the hand some conservatory that was once sit uated at right angles to the Admin

istration Building, just east of the sunken garden. □

If you have always wanted to know

... where the original Magnificent Mile was

... where there is a statue of Pres ident McKinley which-before it was melted down, re-cast, and moved to a new location-depicted Christopher Columbus

... where the garbage dump mentioned in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle used to be...

you should have been on the bus with Dominick Pacyga for the Chicago His torical Society tour, "People and In dustry on the South Side" on Saturday, June 9.

The four-hour excursion focused on changes in industry, land use and movements of ethnic groups. In the Near Loop area we looked at the aban doned industrial buildings, wonder ing if plans for Soho in Chicago would attract tenants whose activi ties will make the area live again.

When passing the old Dearborn St. Station, we heard about the neigh borhood of the future which is being built on railroad land, and how the station will be a school and a com munity center. Viewing these wide open spaces, we found it difficult to visualize the area in the days

when the great trains were corning through Chicago and industrialists were benefiting from the closeness of the Loop, the river, the workers and the trains.

Further south, we saw the remnants of Prairie Avenue and understood how encroaching industry and the noise and dirt of the trains closed the grand houses and drove the people away.

On to the Stockyard neighborhoods of Bridgeport, McKinley, Back of the Yards and Canaryville (Irish nick name for hogs). Here we heard about the importance of the parish church, the ward office, the tavern, the drugstore and the funeral parlor in the life of the COillJt.lunity.

A busy Saturday afternoon on West 47th St. attested to ethnic variety, with shop signs in Polish, Lithuanian and Spanish. Only we to rists seemed to be bothered by pungent fumes from a fertilizer plant which has replaced the stockyards and their much heavier odors.

All the live animal pens are gone (except one for animals destined to be koshered in Philadelphia) Land where thousands of people once la bored has been left to go wild or to become sites for small industries or sprawling truck lots employing a few hundred people.

As our tour continued, we learned about physical barriers such as ex pressways, railroad tracks, sports arenas; and how everything changes once you cross the boundaries be tween them. Each ethnic group is memorialized in churches, synagogues and other institutions. We traced the movements of the Irish, for ex ample, through the architectural grandeur of their buildings as they (and we, in 1979) went west on Gar field Blvd.

Our guide defined a "corridor neighborhood" for us; showed us some streets without character and some with the wrong kind of character (too many fast food outlets, parking

.... to page 8

: se t :e A: i: h : : OOKS

blessed with two special treats. The weather was the nicest in memory, and the Hyde Park Historical Society had a patriotic booth selling a full line of "dry goods."

There were items catering to the budget of every age group, from badges to boaters to books. Especially popular were the new HPHS t-shirts, displaying a picture of our headquarters-to-be.

Also available were handsome prints of the building, suitable for framing. These pictorial subjects were particularly appropriate because all profits will go toward the renovation project.

Behind the counter, a progression of volunteers from our ranks handled sales totaling over $800. Our thanks to: Theresa McDermott, Linnea Anderson, Kathleen and Michael Conzen, Tom Jensen, Cheryl and Clyde Watkins, Donald Miller, Christine O'Neill, Tom arid Georgene Pavelec, Margaret Fallers, Betty Davey, and Jean Block. Their en thusiasm also helped recruit 36 new members from among the passing throngs.

Next to our booth was a display on the Rosenwald House, including an excellent scale model by Kenwood Academy senior Josh Gerick. After many hours and repeated explanations of the issues, the Committee to Save the Rosenwald House had secured another 300 signatures!

If you missed your chance to purchase Hyde Park Historical Soci ety paraphernalia, don't fret. We have some left, and will be offer ing them at future meetings and other events.□

HISTORICAL MATERIAL....from page 3

Tannler) is considering several pos sible locations for future archival and book collections of the Society.

In the meantime we are anxious to begin assembling histories of local institutions, pamphlets, biographi cal materials on residents of the community, scrapbooks, photographs, posters, etc. The committee would be happy to consider gifts of these and other historical materials re lating to Hyde Park-Kenwood.

Call Kathleen Conzen at 285-2181

to describe or discuss your possi ble contribution.□

AGING

According to the News Service of the National Trust for Historic Pre servation, more than a third of the nation's housing was built before World War II.

Of the 80 million year-round hous ing units, 34% were constructed be fore 1940. Of the 48 million owner occupied units, 29% pre-date 1940.

And 43% of the 26 million renter occupied units are more than 40 years old.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, from the 1976 annual housing survey.□

HONORS

LIST

The Chicago Foundation for Lit erature Award has been given by Friends of Literature to HPHS Pres ident Jean Block for "her careful ly researched and handsomely illus trated book Hyde Park Houses , a wonderful source book and guide to the architecture of an area where the past is present to be under

NOW AVAILABLE BY MAIL

CITY HOUSE GUIDE

City House: A Guide to Renovating Older Chicago-area Houses is the printed sequel to the popular "City House" exhibition at Navy Pier in February, about which we had an ar ticle in our last Newsletter.

The Guide, a treasury of infor mation and advice, has been pub lished by the city's Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks, 320 No. Clark St., Room 800, Chicago, IL 60610. It can be

ordered by mail for $5.45. □

stood and enjoyed." The book was

published by the University of Chi

cago Press.

ROSENWALD .... from page 3

Mrs. Ranney is associate editor

The American Institute of Arch- itects this year presented six of its 15 Honor Awards to historical preservation projects. One of them was the Chicago Public Library Cul tural Center at Michigan and Ran dolph.

Tours of this handsomely restored building are offered by the Friends of the Library on Thursdays at 11 AM and 1 PM and on Sundays at 1:30.

Groups of 10 or more may schedule tours at other times. Call 269- 2922 between 10 AM and 4 PM during the business week.

The Illinois State Historical So ciety gave its Award of Merit for local and regional history to HPHS Board member Devereux Bowly, Jr. for his book, The Poorhouse: Sub sidized Housin in Chicago, 1895- 1976 Southern Illinois University Press).

Describing the book as "careful- ly researched", the citation said further: "Although it deals with the Chicago experience, it has implica- tions for all cities faced with the problem of providing housing for ; poor people."

of the papers of famed landscape ar chitect Frederick Law Olmstead and chairperson of the Illinois Humani ties Council. Other organizers of the committee include Edna Epstein, 1120 E. 50th St.; John McDermott, 4811 Kimbark Ave.; and Gary Husted, 4900 Ellis Ave.

The Rosenwald house was open to the public in May as part of the An cona School Kenwood House Tour. Vis itors were glad to see that it is in good condition despite the fact that it has not been occupied for more than two years.

With the increasing interest in local history and in preserving sig nificant architecture, it is hoped by the HPHS Board of Directors that soon the Rosenwald house will again be occupied. Its preservation will give future generations some insight into the life of a most remarkable civil rights leader and philanthro

pist. □

The Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter is published quarterly.

Muriel Beadle, Editor Corinne Seither, Typing Michael Conzen, Graphics.

Sierra Club Book Tells

the History of the Great Lakes

Reviewing Jonathan Ela's The Faces of the Great Lakes in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Socie ty, Orvetta M. Robinson of the Illi nois State Museum describes as "ab sorbing" this account of the ecolog ical, geological and human history of our great inland "river of lakes."

Published by the Sierra Club and priced at $24.50, this beautiful book

SOUTH SIDE TOUR... from page 5

lots and gas stations are almost sure to ruin the neighborhood); and said that electing to stay in a changing neighborhood can be cause

includes a preface by conservationist Sigurd Olson and 87 pages of photo graphs by B.A. King, "arranged by region from East to West, from the Thousand Islands to Duluth; remark able photographs [which] depict not only the natural landscape but also the cultural phenomena." Ms. Robinson says this is much more than a good coffee table book (although it is

that too). □

for growth. Hyde Parkers who lived through urban renewal here would surely agree.

For your own guide to changes in Chicago, look for Dominick Pacyga's and Glen Holt's Chicago-A Histori cal Guide to Neighborhoods, to be published this month by the Chicago Historical Society. Paperbound $7.95

□

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N w Il u;a rr

Volume I, Number 4 November, 1979

•.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. .. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. .. •.. •.. •.. •.. •.. .. •.. .•·.·•·.!••.•.···

A Chance to Share, to Observe, to Banquet ·:·::::

Some interesting and instructive events lie just ahead. They include:

► An exhibit called HYDE PARK HISTORY ON SHOW, at Hyde Park Federal, on November 11. You should already have received a mailed announcement and invitation to show your historical treasures. Our next Newsletter will report on the meeting and exhibit.

► On Friday, December 7, the Illinois

NOMINATIONS OPEN FOR THE

rurn[ rnrn [[ruwrurnrn Nominations are now open for

the Paul Cornell Awards, which are presented annually by the Hyde Park Historical Society.

Members are invited to submit short written statements commend ing anyone (except a currently serving HPHS Board member) who significantly furthered community knowledge, appreciation, or pre servation of Hyde Park's histor ical heritage in 1979. (For this purpose, "Hyde Park" is the area between 47th St. and the Midway, Cottage Grove Ave. and the Lake.

Award categories are: books and articles; exhibits; lectures;

Historic Sites Advisory Council, meeting at the Windermere Hotel between 9 and 12, 2 and 5, will consider applications for nomi nation to both the National and the Illinois Historic Registers.

According to Council member Mi chael Conzen (who is also on the HPHS Board), the Council convenes at three-month intervals in dif ferent cities in order to encour age greater public knowledge of its activities and procedures. It has not met before in Hyde Park. Interested citizens are urged to come for the entire meeting or any part of it.

► Our Annual Meeting and Dinner will take place on January 19. Full details will come later. D

This Hyde Park Historical Society

student projects; restoration of exterior or public interior spaces of commercial, civic, or residen tial buildings; and sympathetic

... to page 8

Newsletter is published quarterly.

Muriel Beadle, Editor Corinne Seither, Typing Michael Conzen, Graphics

Library. Renovation well Underway

NOTE: This is the first in a series of reports on the renovation of the Blackstone Branch Library. The following notes were extracted by Muriel Beadle from a conversa tion with architectural historian and HPHS Board member Irma Strauss.

Chicago's first branch library was built in 1904 by Mrs. Timothy

Blackstone to memorialize her hus band. Solon s. Beman (who lived in Kenwood) was the architect of this

Greek Revival building. Exclusive of land, it cost $125,000. The ren ovation is budgeted at $700,000.

Beman's renderings survive in the Burnham Library at the Art Insti tute but the blueprints are missing. Coping with the resultant surprises are the renovation architect, An drew Heard(he lives in Kenwood, too) and the contractor, R. E. Rudnick.

They are doing a sensitive job. Ac cording to Librarian Emma Kemp, they are keeping as much as possible of the original fabric yet are taking full advantage of modern technology.

In 1904, the site was a cow pas ture. Being on alluvial soil, the building has done much settling.

Therefore, the outside stairs need ed resetting. The sidewalks have been repaved. In back, a concrete ramp has replaced the steps. New windows have been installed. (Not to re-use the original frames is too bad, but it wasn't possible.)

All the wiring has been updated and new fluorescent fixtures, ugly but necessary, are in place wher

ever bright light is essential.□

Next report: Restoring the de tails; modern additions.

TAX RELIEF LAW r-;_

MISSES ITS MARK ''--(7

By Carol Moseley Braun Like other best laid schemes of

mice and men, Illinois Senate Bill

244 is a scheme that has gang aft a-gley. It was intended to provide incentive for preservation efforts by granting a 10-yr. tax freeze on single family dwellings in Munici pal Landmark areas or in National

Historic Districts. (There are 26 of the latter in Illinois, among them Hyde Park and Kenwood.)

However, the bill contains many and grave errors. Qualification for the tax freeze depends solely on the house's age and location, not upon the extent of preservation efforts or investment. The owner can take advantage of the tax re lief while allowing the property

to deteriorate for 10 years. He can make "improvements" which funda mentally change the structure, with out loss of tax relief. Wholesale destruction of historic buildings could result from such a loophole.

... to page 7

PAUL CARROLL PAYS FOND TRIBUTE

TO THE IRISH WHO

LIVED HERE IN THE 193O's

By Lesley Bloch

The sanctuary of St. Thomas the Apostle Church was the scene of the Oct. 7 Hyde Park Historical Society meeting. It was an ideal spot for Paul Carroll's recollections, Being Irish in Hyde Park. Sipping "tears of the angels" and speaking from a place normally reserved for saints and priests, he delighted the audience with tales of his family, St.

Thomas Church and Grammar School, and Kenwood--"the stronghold of the Irish mafia in the 1930's."

Nineteenth a'·

Century Picnic Menu A (\,J

At our pleasant Sept. 15 outing to Naper Settlement, the bag lunches were prepared by Thelma Dahlberg, Jean Ervin, Gladys Finn and Chris Lehigh. Thanks, ladies.

HPHS members enjoyed reading the explanatory sheet which accompanied each lunch. It explained that every item on the menu--plum jam sand wiches, deviled eggs, pickles, ap ple and black walnut cookies, but ter cookies with hazelnuts, fresh picked grapes, cider--could have ap peared at an early 19th century pic nic.

This bread too was made by "set ting the sponge" from a carefully kept "starter." The cookie recipes came from century-old cookbooks.

The jam and pickles were homemade. Only the butter was "modern"--i.e., store-bought, not churned at home.

Our 20th century cooks also used plastic bags and paper products- much more convenient than following the 19th century practice of wrap ping sandwiches in a damp cloth, then packing them in a tin or wick

er box. There's a limit to one's yearning for authenticity.□

The relatives living together at 51st and Kenwood were a marvelous crew. The spinster sisters, Nellie and Catherine Rose, attended 6 a.m. Mass, stirred pots of stew and read only the parish obituaries. The four bachelor brothers, aloof from work of any kind, sat behind their news papers--except on the occasions when they came before J.A. Carroll (real estate developer, builder of the Hyde Park Bank, father of Paul) with candidates for marriage, his approv al being required. The candidates were generally unsuitable.

Among young Paul's favorite spots in the neighborhood was the room above the garage at the home of Big Jim McKay. Here, the boy got to see and talk to three pistol-toting bodyguards who played cards continu ally but were always ready for trou ble. A shotgun was a fixture in a corner of the room. Mr. Carroll al so recalled with relish the "Friday night fights with the Protestants from Ray School."

For more Irish wit and wisdom from Paul Carroll, listen to WFMT on Sundays at 10:30 p.m., and look

for his forthcoming book, Chicago, Magic City of the West.□

NOTE: This and the story of Joe Hill (facing page) are corrrplementary. One is written from the viewpoint of a modern day union syrrrpathizer, the other reflects the anti-labor sentiment of many members of the Chicago Establishment in 1886

By Jean Block

Starting with the depression of the 1870's, strife between labor and management was almost constant as workingmen struggled for better wages and working conditions. The Haymarket Riot in 1886 followed a strike at the McCormick works: an apparently peaceable mass meeting was charged by the police, a bomb was thrown into the crowd, and

many people were killed or wounded.

Nine anarchists were arrested and hastily tried. Seven were con victed and sentenced to hang. Al though no one was ever to know who threw the bomb, the charge was that the thrower was incited by the in flammatory speeches of the accused.

An eyewitness account of the night before the execution as well as the execution itself appears in the papers of J. Frank Aldrich at the Chicago Historical Society. At tached to the account is a finely engraved invitation to the hanging.

Aldrich lived at 5649 Blackstone and then at 4800 Kimbark. A cru sading Republican, he was elected President of the County Board in

1886 as part of a reformers' effort to rid the Board of the graft and corruption that were leading the County to bankruptcy.

Because of his office, Aldrich could visit the jail at will. On the eve of the hanging, he talked with August Spies and later wrote:

"Speaking in a well modulated but rather low tone, Spies said he be lieved he had done no wrong, that all they were contending for was the right of free speech, it was the struggle of the masses against the capitalists who had decreed that they should be 'put out of the way'.... I do not recall that we shook hands when I left him; probably not."

As for the execution, Aldrich wrote: "When the caps were adjust ed, Spies said, 'There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you stran- gle today.'... Engel cried, 'Hurrah for Anarchy!' ...Fischer said, 'This is the happiest moment of my life.' Parsons said, 'Will I be allowed to speak Omen of America? Let me speak, Sheriff Watson. Let the voice of the people be heard.

Aldrich concluded (with a final sigh of relief) that the event "gave anarchism in this country a set back from which it has never recovered.

Amen." □

U.S.S. NAUTILUS JOINS ELITE GROUP Evidence that a historic place

.can move around is provided by the listing of the U.S.S. Nautilus on the National Register of Historic Places. This, the world's first a tomic powered vessel and the first submarine to circumnavigate the globe at high speed while it was submerged, dates--how time flies!

--from 1951.

The Navy hasn't decided whether or not to put its historic place

on public display.□

By Lee H. Morgan

A historical society like ours is, by its very nature, specialized in its interests and program. Even more specialized, however, are the labor history societies which exist in thirteen Sta.tes. For example:

The Illinois Labor History Soci ety is among groups trying to se cure a posthumous pardon for Joe Hill, executed for murder in Salt Lake City in 1915 but whose convic tion is felt by many to have been due to anti-labor sentiment.

Joe Hill, born Joel Hagglund in Sweden in 1879, emigrated to the United States in 1910. Here, he joined and became an organizer for the militant Industrial Workers of the World (Ir-m, whose members were popularly known as "Wobblies").

Also a poet and balladeer, he was the great troubadour of the early 20th century labor movement. The following lyrics are typical of his work; this and other of his songs are still popular with folk-singers.

If we workers take a notion,

We can stop all speeding trains, Every ship upon the ocean

We can tie with mighty chains. Every wheel in the creation, Every mine and every mill, Fleets and armies of all nations Will at our command stand still.

Hill's way with words did not desert him upon his arrest for the murder of a Salt Lake City grocer and his son, during the trial, and later. Shortly before his execu tion, he sent to 'Big Bill' Hay wood, the IWW leader, this tele gram: "Good-bye, Bill. I will die as a true-blue rebel. Don't waste time mourning. Organize." And on the night before he faced the fir ing squad, he wrote:

My will is easy to decide,

For there is nothing to divide.

My kin don't need to fuss and moan--

"Moss does not cling to a roll- ing stone."

My body? Ah, if I could choose, I would to ashes it reduce, And let the merry breezes blow My dust to where some flowers

grow,

Perhaps some fading flower then Would come to life and bloom again. This is my last and final will, Good luck to all of you--Joe Hill.

On November 19, 1915, he died, despite pleas for a pardon from thousands of people. As for a post humous pardon, Utah's attorney gen eral says that neither Utah law, fed eral law nor English common law pro vide for it. The Illinois Labor His tory Society is sending its petitions anyway. Its president, Lester Orear, says, "The Utah ruling isn't final; it's only a skirmish." D

FUNDS SOUGHT; GIFT RECIEVED

The drive to raise funds to re store our headquarters building at 5529 Lake Park Ave. is fully under way. Applications for major grants are pending before several founda tions and others are being prepared for banks and corporations.

The first donation of a fixture for the building has been received from Dr. and Mrs. Albert Dahlberg, both HPHS Board members. It is a late 19th century water closet, com

plete with a mahogany water tank with tin lining.□

Where are the records of the South Park Improvement Associa tion? They must be in someone's basement, but whose?

If you know, or can provide a clue, get in touch with Jean Block

at 1700 E. 56th St., Chicago 60637i phone 363-9093. □

Strolling along Lake Parl( in days gone by

NOTE: Lake Park Ave., formerly Lake Ave., is now--thanks to urban renewal--hard by the west side of the I.e. embankment. But fragments of the original thoroughfare remain: for example, the section of today's Lake Park between 56th and 57th; the block that abuts the Hyde Park Bank on the east between 53rd and 54th; the driveway and parking lot east of Hyde Park Federal; the roadway which the Black stone Branch Library faces.

According to a memoir written by a pioneer settler here, Mrs. Homer Nash Hibbard, Hyde Park in 1860 "was a cluster of scattered houses, less than a score, dropped down among the oak trees. There was no store, no postoffice, no market, and a single passenger car on the Illinois Central, three times a day, was the only connection with the city except Purcell's ox-cart, which served as an express to bring from the city barrels of flour and groceries. The one sidewalk, a board walk on Lake Avenue, was fringed with ferns and violets, wild flowers and strawberries."

--from the 1910 history of the Hyde Park Presbyterian

Church (now the United Church of Hyde Park)

About 1925, an 11-year-old youngster named Fred Sherwood lived

at 5442 Dorchester, attended Ray School, and roamed the community during his leisure hours. A little over 50 years later, this is how he remembers Lake Park Ave. (from which the ferns and violets had certainly departed):

"There was still a livery stable there; also a wholesale butcher and a cigar shop where the owner sat in the window, hand-rolling ci gars. There were several horse troughs with semi-circular basins, one of which also had a slow-flowing 'people' spout."

--from a 1979 letter from Fred Sherwood, who now lives in Sawyer, Michigan.□

HAVE YOU EATEN AT THE COLLEGE INN?

Where students meet and eat. Best food at best prices.

READERS CAMPUS DRUG STORE.

61st and Ellis Avenue Fairfax 4800 ( also on campus exchange)

ADVERTISING IN THE NEWSLETTER?

Not yet. Older Hyde Parkers may re member Readers Campus Drug Store and correctly date the ad as circa 1935. (HPHS Board member and Uni

City House

March 21-23, 1980 are the dates for Chicago's second annual "CITY HOUSE: A Home Improvement Fair of Older Houses," at Navy Pier. If you want to exhibit, call Edward Jeske

at 744-3200. □

versity Archivist Al Tannler dug it out for us.)

\.......,.

,o.» --iiiiiiiiiiir'.)

The half-timber and stucco shops and gas station at 61st and Ellis were built in 1931. The University owned other commercial property in Hyde Park-from offices let to the Anti-Saloon League to shoe shining parlors-but the stores at 61st and Ellis were the first it had built for the benefit of students.

As the University Record said, these shops would make it easy for students "to buy a linen collar or obtain a 'permanent wave'". It was expected that dormitories for wo men would be erected near the ex isting College Residence Hall for Men (now Burton-Judson). Its Goth ic splendor was, of course, the reason for the Olde Englishe archi tecture of the retail shops.

Although the women's dorms never materialized, the stores long did well. The University still owns them but, alas, only the gas sta tion is open. The shops are boarded up, waiting for a revival of the economy south of the Midway. D

--Muriel Beadle

SENATE BILL 244 from page 2

Governor Thompson signed the bill into law on Sept. 22, but used his amendatory veto to postpone the ef fective date of the legislation from January 1980 to January 1981. This, he said, was to give preser vationists a chance "to work with the sponsors to improve the bill."

Anyone who cares about the pres ervation of our architectural heri tage should send his or her sugges tions for the amendment of Senate Bill 244 to its sponsors, Sen. Jer emiah E. Joyce and Rep. Daniel P.

O'Brien, care of their respective legislative bodies in Springfield.□

1909 SJOUJTTI 'O RJJqJ

.:ia:isarp..roa ooo

SARH "J i\JURN

NOW IS THE TIME TO MAKE NOMINATIONS FOR THE PAUL CORNELL AWARDS

From page 1

renovation or adaptive re-use. Our awards may be made in any, all, or none of those categories, but only one award will be made in each cat egory. Recipients of awards will be announced at our annual meeting in January. Send your nominations by Dec. 1 to Kathleen Conzen, 1333 E. 50th St., Chicago 60615.

To refresh your memory, our 1978 awards went to:

0 George Cooley, "for leadership in researching and preparing a plan for the restoration of the Wooded Island to its former glory."

0 Mr. and Mrs. Victor Barcilon, "for their sensitive exterior res toration of the Heller House [5136 Woodlawn Ave.], tuckpointing it in the unique manner initially speci fied by its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright."

0 Eliza Davey, "for developing an architectural outdoor study-game, Queen Anne Meets the Greek, which heightens the observational skills of parents and children."

Incidentally, there's a nice se quel to this one. Mrs. Davey, An cona School's Art Center Coordina tor, will produce three similar Streetgames during 1979-80, thanks to a $26,000 grant from the Nation al Endowment for the Humanities.

The Games will be tested city-wide by 12 to 17 year olds. □

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ttlt®IT

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue

Volume 10, Number I

Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM February, 1988

Early History of Jackson Park

by Julia Kramer

Julia Kramer (Mrs. Ferdinand Kramer) is a genealogist and local history buff.

Although the five hundred acres which became the East Division (Jackson Park) of the South Park were marshy, largely uninhabitable and without much intrinsic value, much occurred on or about the land to add many colorful chapters and footnotes to the early history of development of the park and of Chicago and Hyde Park.

The Potowatamie Indians undoubtedly hunted and fished on this property south of the village of Chicago before the treaty of 1833 which ended the Black Hawk War and ceded the lands west of Lake Michigan to the United States. The lands went on public sale by the U.S. Government on June 15, 1835, and were bought for $1.25 an acre, in the wild speculation of the times in all western lands.

One of the few persons to actually live on this unappealing property was Charles Burton Phillips, a sometime Baptist preacher and full time real estate speculator. He purchased one hundred ninety-six acres in 1849 for $500, double the original price. To this acreage, which lay between 59th Street and 63rd Street and stretched from the Michigan Road (later Stony Island Ave.) to the lake, and was bounded on the west by a high ridge of timber, he brought his new wife, Elizabeth Wright. They named their home "Eg?emont", built a barn and a two story frame house, painted it yellow, laid out a ten acre vegetable garden with a large strawberry patch, spent much money

placing fences to keep out the cattle and hired men to dig ditches by hand to drain the land. They sold corn from their farm

to neighboring Hyde Parkers, but the farm was barely self sufficient. Due to an increasing number of creditors, including William Kerr who had a $6,400 lien against the land, a perennial lack of ready cash, the Panic of 1857, and Charles' eccentric and roving ways, they lived unhappily there until 1862 when the house burned down under mysterious circumstances and they separated. Lizzie returned to her father's home in Cincinnati. Little did they realize that their domestic troubles and their property would become the center of a controversy which would hold up the development of Jackson Park for almost fifteen years after condemnation of the land in 1870.

In 1867, the Illinois legislature passed a bill establishing a park in South Chicago and Hyde Park, and, although voted down by the people, interest in and

around the proposed sites increased enormously. By February of 1869, another park bill had been approved by the voters. With considerable pressure from real estate speculators and Hyde Park landowners for determining which lands were to be put in or out of the park

(those just outside of the park being the more valuable), the legislature created the South Park Commission to oversee the development. The first South Park Commissioners, John M. Wilson, Paul Cornell, I.B. Sidway, J.T. Bowen and George Gage, hired the famed landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park in New York, as the designer.

The South Park Commissioners, with authority to sell bonds for $2,000,000, and to tax and assess the contiguous property to finance the purchase of land

for the park, hoped to yield enough revenue to pay for the entire park system within the first five years. The prevailing opinion was that parks always produce more than they cost, due mostly to the enhanced valuation of nearby property. What no one had counted on, however, was the length of time it would take to condemn and purchase the lands, the amount and cost of litigation, or the difficulty in collecting the taxes and assessments. Certainly no one could have anticipated the I 871 Chicago Fire which burned all the land records, along with the Olmsted and Vaux' original plans.

The land cost more than $3,500,000 for the entire South Park system by the time all was settled in the mid I 880's.

In the East Division of South Park, about half of rhe lands condemned were purchased in 1870 at prices ranging from

$1,400 per acre to $2,000 per acre, already higher than the $700 per acre the Commissioners had expected to pay. Two parcels of land, however, were in dispute. One was a seventy-eight acre piece on the easterly side of a two hundred acre tract between 63rd Street and 67th Street, owned·'by forty four persons. The other was the one hundred ninety-six acre tract once lived on by Charles Phillips, its ownership clouded by numerous claims and pseudo claims, including that of William Kerr who had executed his judgment on the land in 1863.

The clearing of the title to Phillips' tract became a "Celebrated Case" - a tangled web of litigation, tried in the United States Courts, the Cook County

Courts, twice in the Supreme Court of the United States and several times in the Supreme Court of the State of Illinois over a period of fifteen years. The cases provided employment to numbers of lawyers, many of whom took their fees in titles to small portions of the disputed land or ees contingent on the lTnarland value. There were ten thousand pages of testimony in what one of the judges called the most "complicated" case he had ever tried. At issue was whether William Kerr, owner of the land by virtue of the lien, had title to homestead lands which had been abandoned when Charles Phillips

had deserted Elizabeth. This was finally resolved in 1885 when William Kerr was declared the owner of one hundred eleven acres, for which he received $1,450 per acre plus interest of 6% per year from August 27, 1870. Eighty acres was declared homestead land and therefore not subject to the lien on the rest of the

property. Charles Phillips was declared the owner of forty five acres and Elizabeth Wright Phillips, the owner of thirty five acres of the homestead lands. The judge, striking an early blow for women's rights, ruled that since Charles had abandoned Elizabeth, she was "head of household" and had an independent

right to the land. Charles received $800 an acre plus 6070 interest per year from 1870.

As for the other tract of seventy-eight acres, there were three different trials before the value of the land was decreed to be $1,800-$1,900 per acre. The judge threw out the first two verdicts as "excessive".

While this litigation stretched out from 1870 to 1885, the South Park Commissioners saw the costs of procuring the land rising and they chafed under the expense and delay. In 1873 they complained in their annual report, "In the East Division, Commissioners have met greatest difficulty in gaining title sufficient to warrant their proceeding in the work of improvement. The very fact that the surface of ground admits of no other way of laying out except in continuous lakes and lagoons as planned by Olmsted and Vaux in their original draught of the park, prevents them from beginning the work without possession of the whole tract".

2 - February, 1988

We Need Your Help!

The Hyde Park Historical Society is looking for volunteers. Please check those activities listed below that interest you. We need your ideas and your labor in whatever quantity you can spare.

Thank you. We think you'll have a good time too!

Program Committee Hosting at Headquarters

Exhibits Committee Mailing Correspondence

Newsletter Student Education

Membership Community Awareness/PR

Other Ideas

Please return this form to the Headquarters or call Historical Society President Jay Mulberry at 288-1242 to volunteer or to receive more information.

Lttle work was done in the East Division before 1876, but roads and sewers were put in, Stony Island Avenue was completed, the Twin Lakes were put into operation, trees were planted and a pier was built.

While the land was in dispute, many other controversies raged and tempers flared; unauthorized individuals were selling sand and gravel from the lake. The shoreline was being eroded because the placement of piers seven miles north of Chicago had redirected storms to the south lake shore. Cattle were roaming loose on the land and fences had to be

put up to keep them off. The neighbors continued their sport of shooting wild pigeons on the property. Elizabeth

Phillips and her son brought lumber down the lake on a tug one night in August

1873 and erected a house on the old property, only to see it torn down the next day by the park police. A flock of sixty eight sheep was kept to keep the grass under control. The Commissioners sold ice and hay from the land each year or extra_income. The Panic of 1873 added to the difficulty of collecting the assessments from the neighboring property, and in one year alone, the legal fees for the land purchases were $11,000.

By the mid-I 880's, as the land was finally purchased in full, Jackson Park gradually began to be developed with some of the lakes and grounds that Olmsted had envisioned. Twin Lakes was a popular skating place, drawing forty four thousand persons in 1884, while the picnics and concerts drew some seventy thousand people a year earlier. Three lawn tennis courts were added in 1886,

and soon proved to be far too few for the demand; twelve more were added the next year. A stone water closet was built for the ladies, five hundred feet north of 59th Street - "durable, ornamental and much

needed". Besides fourteen acres of artificial lakes and two baseball diamonds, there was a large shelter erected near 56th Street, big enough for two thousand five hundred people to dance on the maple floor. It was occupied almost every evening in the good weather for dancing parties of all kinds. There were even a "number of interesting matches of foot ball played in Jackson Park where the meadow is well adapted to the game."

By 1890 when Jackson Park became the site chosen for the World's Fair, there were eighty two acres of oak-covered ridge, twenty four acres of artificial lakes and three hundred six acres of open

space. The South Park system had been in process of construction for over twenty years. Sewering, road making, grading, planting and building a complete breakwater, along with the purchase of the lands had cost the taxpayer a little

over $7,000 an acre, still below the average price of unimproved land

adjacent to the park. With the infusion of money for the Fair, Olmsted was hired again to turn the land into wooded islands and Venetian canals and Jackson Park finally became the complete park that its planners had envisioned.

Postscript:

As for Charles and Elizabeth Phillips, they did not live long enough to enjoy the

money they received or to see the property they had lived on and fought so bitterly over for thirty years of their lives, turned into meadows and lakes, full of phaetons, promenading Hyde Parkers, tennis and baseball players, boaters and dancers.

Elizabeth died in 1889. Her son married the family lawyer's daughter. Charles died in 1890, leaving his small estate to the Oneida Community in New York, a uptopian settlement where no one was allowed to own any private property. His will was a final tirade against all lawyers.

References

William Kerr vs South Park Commissioners. United States Circuit Court, Northern District of

Illinois #17908, #14931, #17198

Susie Kerr vs South Park Commissioners. United States Circuit Court, Northern District of Illinois #17909, 14931, 17198

Elizabeth Ann Phillips vs William Kerr, South Park Commissioners et al. Cook County Circuit Court and United States Circuit Court, Northern District of Illinois

South Park Commissioners vs Frances Sunlevy et al. Old Su;,erior Court Records Cook County, Illinois #71089

Waite, Catherine F., ed., "The Chicago Law Times" Vol. I, Chicago 1887

The Federal Reporter, Vol. 13. West Publishing, St. Paul 1882

Reports of Cases at Law and Chancery Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Illinois. Springfield 1887

United States Reports. Vol. 117 1887

South Park Commissioners Minutes of Meetings. Mss. Chicago Historical Society

Annual Reports 1869-1889. South Park Commissioners. Chicago Historical Society

Chamberlin, Everett, "Chicago and Its Suburbs" Chgo, 1874 pp. 313-324. Land Records, Cook County, Illinois

3- February, 1988

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HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue

Volume 10, Number 1

Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM February, 1988

Early History of Jackson Park

by Julia Kramer

Julia Kramer (Mrs. Ferdinand Kramer) is a genealogist and local history buff.

One of the few persons to actually live on this unappealing property was Charles Burton Phillips, a sometime Baptist preacher and full time real estate speculator. He purchased one hundred ninety-six acres in 1849 for $500, double the original price. To this acreage, which lay between 59th Street and 63rd Street and stretched from the Michigan Road (later Stony Island Ave.) to the lake, and was bounded on the west by a high ridge of timber, he brought his new wife, Elizabeth Wright. They named their home "Eglemont", built a barn and a two story frame house, painted it yellow, laid out a ten acre vegetable garden with a large strawberry patch, spent much money

placing fences to keep out the cattle and hired men to dig ditches by hand to drain the land. They sold corn from their farm

In 1867, the Illinois legislature passed a bill establishing a park in South Chicago and Hyde Park, and, although voted down by the people, interest in and

The South Park Commissioners, with authority to sell bonds for $2,000,000, and to tax and assess the contiguous property to finance the purchase of lands

The land cost more than $3,500,000 for the entire South Park system by the time all was settled in the mid I 880's.

In the East Division of South Park, about half of rhe lands-contlemned were purchased in 1870 at prices ranging from

$I ,400 per acre to $2,000 per acre, already higher than the $700 per acre the Commissioners had expected to pay. Two parcels of land, however, were in dispute. One was a seventy-eight acre piece on the easterly side of a two hundred acre tract between 63rd Street and 67th Street, owned·'by forty four persons. The other was the one hundred ninety-six acre tract once lived on by Charles Phillips, its ownership clouded by numerous claims and pseudo claims, including that of William Kerr who had executed his judgment on the land in 1863.

The clearing of the title to Phillips' tract became a "Celebrated Case" - a tangled web of litigation, tried in the United States Courts, the Cook County

Courts, twice in the Supreme Court of the United States and several times in the Supreme Court of the State of Illinois over a period of fifteen years. The cases provided employment to numbers of lawyers, many of whom took their fees in titles to small portions of the disputed land or feescontingent on therfnal7and value. There were ten thousand pages of testimony in what one of the judges called the most "complicated" case he had ever tried. At issue was whether William Kerr, owner of the land by virtue of the lien, had title to homestead lands which had been abandoned when Charles Phillips

had deserted Elizabeth. This was finally resolved in 1885 when William Kerr was declared the owner of one hundred eleven acres, for which he received $1,450 per acre plus interest of 607o per year from August 27, 1870. Eighty acres was declared homestead land and therefore not subject to the lien on the rest of the

right to the land. Charles received $800 an acre pl us 607o interest per year from 1870.

2 - February, 1988

We Need Your Help!

The Hyde Park Historical Society is looking for volunteers. Please check those activities listed below that interest you. We need your ideas and your labor in whatever quantity you can spare.

Thank you. We think you'll have a good time tool

Program Committee Hosting at Headquarters

Exhibits Committee Mailing Correspondence

Newsletter Student Education

Membership Community Awareness/PR

Other Ideas

Please return this form to the Headquarters or call Historical Society President Jay Mulberry at 288-1242 to volunteer or to receive more information.

put up to keep them off. The neighbors continued their sport of shooting wild pigeons on the property. Elizabeth

Phillips and her son brought lumber down the lake on a tug one night in August

By the mid-1880's, as the land was finally purchased in full, Jackson Park gradually began to be developed with some of the lakes and grounds that Olmsted had envisioned. Twin Lakes was a popular skating place, drawing forty four thousand persons in I 884, while the picnics and concerts drew some seventy thousand people a year earlier. Three lawn tennis courts were added in 1886,

By 1890 when Jackson Park became the site chosen for the World's Fair, there were eighty two acres of oak-covered ridge, twenty four acres of artificial lakes and three hundred six acres of open

over $7,000 an acre, still below the average price of unimproved land

Postscript:

As for Charles and Elizabeth Phillips, they did not live long enough to enjoy the

References

William Kerr vs South Park Commissioners. United States Circuit Court, Northern District of

Illinois #17908, #14931, #17198

Susie Kerr vs South Park Commissioners. United States Circuit Court, Northern District of Illinois #17909, 14931, 17198

Elizabeth Ann Phillips vs William Kerr, South Park Commissioners et al. Cook County Circuit Court and United States Circuit Court, Northern District of Illinois

South Park Commissioners vs Frances Sunlevy et al. Old Su;,erior Court Records Cook County, Illinois #71089

Waite, Catherine F., ed., "The Chicago Law Times" Vol. 1, Chicago 1887

The Federal Reporter, Vol. 13. West Publishing, St. Paul 1882

Reports of Cases at Law and Chancery Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Illinois. Springfield 1887

United States Reports. Vol. 117 1887

South Park Commissioners Minutes of Meetings. Mss. Chicago Historical Society

Annual Reports 1869-1889. South Park Commissioners. Chicago Historical Society

Chamberlin, Everett, "Chicago and Its Suburbs" Chgo, 1874 pp. 313-324. Land Records, Cook County, Illinois

3 - February, 1988

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HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

May, 1988

The Filipino American Experience in Hyde Park

Excerp1s from remarks by Jane "Terry" Afay11 ?,iven ar rhe openin?. of rhe Filipino American Exhibir Hyde Park Hisroricaf Sociery, February 27, 1988.

Some of the first "Pensionados" - Philippine Government Sponsored tudents - and other Filipinos a well, settled in Hyde Park in

the 1920's. Of 717 students in the United States in 1924, 108 lived in Chicago. Twenty attended the University of Chicago; others were at Hyde Park High School and medical, art, music, technical, busine , and engineering schools. Most of these students were bachelors, but there were a few families and a few women as well.

By the 1930's, 15 to 20 Filipino families had settled in the area and their children attended Ray, Fisk, and Kosminski Schools. Some were students at Mrs.

Green's Nursery School at the Hyde Park Baptist Church (now the Hyde Park Union Church) and many attended St.

Thomas as well.

Because at that time Filipinos were nationals, not eligible for citizenship, nor were they considered aliens, and their numbers were small, they found solace in their countrymen and formed social clubs which picnicked at Jackson Park, played

tennis at Washington Park, and participated in activities at Brent House and International Hou e. They al o delighted the community by Oying their colorful and unique homemade kite on the Midway.

Filipinos were also active in the business community here in Hyde Park; the National Tea and A & P Store are gone, but "Louie's Barber Shop". almost an institution, is till located on 53rd Street. A Filipino al o owned a 57th Street restaurant at the location of the original Tropical Hut.

Many families have remained in the community, ome having had to buy their first homes on contract, because at that time mortgages were not available to them. Because of the University, friends and relatives were encouraged to migrate to Chicago. Many doctors and nurses were trained at the University hospitals and the only Filipino member of the New York Stock Exchange has fond memories of her years in Hyde Park.

Hyde Park and the Filipino American community have been good for each other.

Philippine Night at International House, 1933

Congratulations to Paul Cornell A ward Winners, 1988

Frederick and Elizabeth Kopko receive their award from Win Kennedy, Chair of the Awards Committee, for the restoration of the Rosenwald house and grounds which had been neglected for more than three decades.

Edward Gardner accepts the award presented to him and to his wife, Bettiann, for the re-establishment of a cultural and historical institution by their renovation of the New Regal Theater. Barbara Flynn Currie, Master of Ceremonies, offer her congratulations.

Karen Knudstrup accept her award from Emma Kemp, committee member, for developing a neighborhood history component, and the research skills which it requires, in the sixth through eighth grade at Kenwood Academy.

Committee member Steve Treffman presents the award to the University of Chicago Press for its commitment to publishing works regarding the social and architectural history of Chicago and its communities.

Researching the History of Your House

by Devereux Bowly

Gathering information about the history

Hyde Park Historical Society Archives

Since its inception, the Hyde Park Historical Society has received donations of books, documents, photographs and other material related to the histories of the communities of Hyde Park, Kenwood, and Woodlawn as well as the city of Chicago. Some of this material is retained in the headquarters of the Society. Most,

of your house can be a lengthy process, although if you are lucky you may find out some interesting things with a minimum of effort. There is no single way to proceed, but like a detective, a person should explore several avenues, each of which may, or may not, produce significant information. It is not possible here to do more than suggest a few ways to get started. Once the research is underway, one thing often leads to another.

A good place to begin is in the appendix of Jean Block's Hyde Park Houses (which is for sale at the headquarters). If your house is listed, you will learn the date of construction, original owner and his occupation, and the name of the architect. From there the sources are numerous, and include among others:

- Chicago Historical Society Library, where much information is available about prominent Chicagoans.

- City's Department of lnspectional Services (9th noor of City Hall), where you may find on microfilm the original building permit for the hou e, or permits for subsequent major work done on it.

- Cook County Recorder of Deed (basement of County Building), where you can trace the history of ownership of the property.

- Burnham Library of the Art Institute, the best architectural library in town.

For a more detailed description of how to do the actual research necessary to gather the history of a house, one should obtain a copy of the booklet "Your House Has a History," from the city's Commission on Chicago Landmarks, by phoning them at 744-3200.

however, has been placed in the Society's archives, which are located in the Special Collections Department of The University of Chicago's Regenstein Library. Our Society has about ten lineal feet of shelved material in the archives and recent acquisitions are now being readied for entry into the collection. The archives may be consulted upon application to the library's Special Collections Department during normal business hours. Its staff report that the Society's archives have attracted attention and are being used frequently by a variety of researchers.

Facilitating their work is an inventory of the current holdings that was prepared by Mrs. Jean Block, the original organizer of our collection and the Society's long time archivist. Boardmember Stephen A. Treffman has recently succeeded her in that position.

Our Annual Meeting

A Gourmet Gathering with Touches of Terra Cotta

Photos by Nancy Hays

Board member Roland Kulla prepares a Terra Cotta centerpiece for the buffet Lable which will shortly feature a scrumptous dinner catered by Michael Kilgore.

Ed Campbell, who presented a delightful program - a slide presentation titled "Hidden Highlights of Hyde Park" -considers Roberta MacGowan's question .

• President Jay Mulberry presents bouquets to Bee Boehm and Eleanor Swift in appreciation of their long and dedicated service on the Society's Board.

Rita, Bob, and Kitty Picken arrive laden with decorations and sweet surprises. Kitty was chair of the annual dinner meeting.

Enjoying Ed Campbell's slides are Ward and Dorothy Perrin and Estrella and Justo Alamar.

Lauranita Dugas, retmng Board member, and active member Alta Blakely exchange reminiscences.

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A Gold Mine of Information ...

that's what the workshop KEEPING UP YOUR HISTORIC HOUSE provided

at its meeting on May 14th. Organized by Board member Richard Nayer, who is a General Contractor and Construction Manager, a panel of experts presented slides and described their special areas of expertise. Walter Arnold, a Stone Carver, showed slides of carved mantels he had constructed for the Rosenwald House renovation. Representatives from The Decorator's Supply Corp., a firm which goes back to the World's Fair of 1893, outlined the process used for making decorative wood cornices and trim. There was an enthusiastic question and answer period with those in attendance making good use of their opportunity to ask an expert. Participants were:

Richard Nayer

Nayer Construction Company 329 West 18th St., 60616

Stephen K. Grage & Stephen G. Jonassen Decorator's Supply Corp.

3610-12 S. Morgan, 60609

David Arndt, Masonry Contractor Arndt Construction

667-1611

Edward Kochan & Greg Grzesinski Racine Sheet Metal Works

3244 N. Sheffield, 60657

Walter S. Arnold, Stone Carver 329 W. 18th St., 60616

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Volume 10, Numbers 3 and 4 Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

October, 1988

Jean Block had so many gifts and she shared them so generously with the Hyde Park Historical Society - in its founding and in all the years since. We mourn her death and will truly miss her kind and thoughtful presence as well as the continuing contribution she made to the Society's on-going programs. Her sensible and intelligent suggestions often kept the Society on the right track and her scholarship was a matter of pride for all. In the article below, Clyde Watkins, who with Jean first envisioned a Hyde Park Historical Society, shares some of his memories with us.

Remembering Jean

by Clyde Warkins

One of the wonderful things about growing up, and then remaining as an adult in the same community, is that you get to know so many people. Better yet, your relationships evolve as you mature. When I first met Jean Block, I was fourteen and she was, to me, the mother of schoolmates at U-High. I knew nothing of her interest in history -- particularly Hyde Park's history -- because my own appreciation of the past and its influence on the present had not yet developed.

Some years later, when I was part of a small group of people trying to identify and bring together the critical mass for a "Historical League of Hyde Park Kenwood," Jean was the first bona fide expert on local history to emerge. In fact I don't remember exactly how or when she became involved, probably because she was there from the first moment our efforts had any degree of substance. I do remember this: she gave us a credibility we never would have had otherwise. She made all of us recognize the potential such an organization could have.

For example, when the few of us thus far involved realized at lunch one day, over a tureen of wonderful homemade soup at Jean's apartment, that we needed a dynamic leader to help catalyze mere interest into an institution, she not only identified Muriel Beadle, but arranged the meeting and, when we asked Muriel to become our first president, convinced her

Jean Block, Walter Netsch,

HPHS Annual Meeting, 1986

to accept. (And Jean was right -- talk about decisive leadership! Muriel thought for a moment and replied, "OK, ['II do it. We're going to call this the Hyde Park Historical Society and here are the first three things I want the two of you to do by next week ... ")

As good Hyde Parkers we took ourselves very seriously indeed during those formative days. After all, we were making history! Throughout our endless meetings, Jean was always present, always observing our antics with her modest and marvelous smile, just patiently waiting for us to get beyond the bureaucracy o we could get started on the substance. To her the most important thing was to offer programs -- events and publications which would enlighten our neighbors and excite them too about the significance and uniqueness of our community's history.

Jean influenced us in a variety of fundamentalfy important ways during those early years of the Society. First, she had a real love of both history and architecture, and understood their relationship. She kept us from going too far in either direction. She also had a gift for relating to people, in her non threatening way, so that each could enjoy his or her own discoveries and brainstorms, even though she had been working with these truths herself for years. This made it easy for young whippersnappers to participate right along

with those who had a more vested interest in the events of earlier eras in Hyde Park's history. lt is a real plus for our Society that this trait has endured, and Jean had a lot to do with creating the climate of openness and goodwill which made such a broad spectrum of involvement possible.

Let me give another example of her admirable restraint. She was known and appreciated by many influential and wealthy people all over Chicago. When it came time to raise the money to restore our headquarters, I know she could have contacted a few friends and taken care of the entire thing. (Amazingly, $45,000 is not considered such a huge sum by everyone!) Yet Jean didn't interfere. She let all of us participate, building our own commitment through our hopes and our efforts. She dutifully went along on the foundation calls, and only dropped a modest note to her friends (who sat on all the boards) afterwards, just to make sure. Little did we know that, with Jean involved, we were in great shape before we started.

Participating in the creation of the Hyde Park Historical Society was a

wonderful experience for a number of people. r feel really privileged to have been a part of it. Getting to know, and

like, and deeply admire Jean was certainly a high point we all shared. We were lucky to have her.

HPHS Establishes Jean Friedberg Block Award

At its meeting in May, 1988, the Board unanimously, and with heartfelt affection for Jean Block, established an award in her name. It will be presented occasionally for a distinguished work devoted to Hyde Park History. The letter below from Ed Campbell, who will chair the Award Selection Committee, and a response from Jean's daughter Elizabeth, will be of interest to Society members.

Neighborhood Oral History Project

The Society is interested in coordinating a neighborhood oral history project in which any number of local organizations could cooperate to interview subjects and then pool and catalog the results.

Community institutions such as churches have obvious reasons for wanting to gather the memories of their members. But other groups should, too. Social service organizations, clubs, schools and ethnic groups have histories which should not be lost.

If interest is shown, the Society will help train oral historians, keep track of work in progress and arrange for interchange of documents. If the idea appeals to you, call 288-1242 to get involved.

HPHS Members Invited

to Frank Lloyd Wright Homes

A gracious invitation has been extended to HPHS members and their guests to visit two Frank Lloyd Wright houses on Sunday afternoon, November 6--the McArthur House at 4852 S. Kenwood and the Blossom House at 4858 S. Kenwood.

Ruth Michael and Alice Shaddle Baum are the hostesses.

The group will meet first at 3 p.m. at the McArthur House and hear about the history of the homes. Refreshments will be served.

The number of guests will necessarily be

limited to thirty. Members interested are asked to send a five-dollar donation, per person, to:

The Hyde Park Historical Society 5529 S. Lake Park Blvd.

Chicago, IL 60637

Tickets will be mailed to the first thirty members responding.

Be An Expert

by Jay Mulberry, President

We are a soceity of amateurs, admittedly. But amateurs have expertise which is wanted by others.

Every week I receive calls from people who want to know more about something. Sometimes they are interested in a person, or a house; sometimes they are interested in a style of architecture; sometimes they want to know about literary figures or criminals; often they just want to know what things were like "back then." Most of the time I wish I would direct them to someone who knows more than I do.

No one expects you to be a guru. People just want to talk with someone who knows more than they. And you do. Please notify the society if you would be willing to try and answer questions on some topic. First we will make a list for our own use and eventually we will make a directory. But remember, nobody expects you to be any more than a bit better informed than they.

Name: Subject of interest: _ Phone Number:

(Or if you would rather, call 288-1242 and give that information.)

HYDE PARK DOORWAYS

Text and Photographs by Edward A. Campbell

Examples of doorways from a period of 120 years, 1868 to 1988, are included in this selection--a random lot which attracted the fancy of the photographer. Most of the buildings are from the first half of the period, ending roughly about 1930 when the Great Depression brought construction to a virtual standstill and the influence of the International Style changed the taste for ornament on buildings.

After centuries of doorways iden tified to make a celebration of arrival and to mark the transition from the common places to the special spaces, entrances became almost indistinguish able from other elements of the building facade. Doorways on modern buildings, usually de-emphasized, were strictly functional--no celebration there.

But with the advent of Post Modern style in architecture, the entrance once more is marked: a grand arch frames the doors to the John Crerar Library, gables appear over the entrances to the Kersten Center and a whimsical false pediment with a window tops the Prairie City Diner--all built since 1984.

Echoes of most historical styles and classical elements are found in the or nament of the elaborate doorways of the 19th and early 20th century buildings. There are classical columns with pediments, some angular, some round, some broken. You see post and lintel framings with plain or fluted pillars, Doric, Ionic or Corinthian capitals with plain surfaces or reliefs of festoons, garlands or scrollwork on the architrave. Romanesque arches were popular; one curious example has stub by but massive granite columns sup porting a round arch of rusticated stone springing from Corinthian capitals. The arch is outlined with an egg and dart border.

4840 Ellis A venue. 1891 Frederick Perkins, architect

5720 Ellis A venue. 1986

Kersten Physics Teaching Center University of Chicago

Holabird & Root, architects

5730 Ellis Avenue. 1984 John Crerar Library University of Chicago

Hugh Stubbins & Associates, architects

5600 Drexel Boulevard

5626 Woodlawn A venue

5757 Kimbark Avenue. 1908 Argyle Robinson, architect

5532-34 Kimbark Avenue

5649 Woodlawn A venue. 1903

H. S. Jaffray, architect

1108 East 52nd Street

5757 Woodlawn Avenue. 1909 house for Fred Robie

Frank Lloyd Wright, architect

5638 Dorchester A venue. 1906 5623 Drexel Avenue

Gothic arches with pinnacles, crockets, cusps and tracery, and quatrefoil reliefs sometimes appear over classical columns. Tudor and Georgian periods were the inspiration for many doorways.

Simpler entrances to frame houses include two from the 1860's, both in Italianate style: the house at 5630 Kim bark, and the house at 5417 Black stone. There is gingerbread ornament from 1890 and a later house with a front porch, classic pillars and balustrade.

The four Frank Lloyd Wright houses whose entrances are exhibited (Blossom 1892, McArthur 1892, Heller 1897 and Robie 1909) offer a glimpse of the transition from the traditional to the unique expression of his genius. (The Robie House door originally had leaded inserts of stained glass in geometric patterns similar to those of the windows throughout the house.)

4858 Kenwood Avenue. 1892 house for George Blossom Frank Lloyd Wright, architect

The row houses show a wide range of design from the plain graystones of 1882, the Victorian gaudy of 5200 Blackstone, 1889, the various classical facades of the Brompton block of 5200 Greenwood, to the warm serenity and gracious courts of the Ben Weese

groupings between Kenwood and Kim

bark, and the somber formality of the Macsai houses at Dorchester and 57th Street.

The Art Deco examples really mark the end of this period of effulgence in ornamented doorways. The Powhatan, an elegant highrise apartment, in tegrates American Indian and Art Deco design elements with finesse; the St. Thomas Apostle School entrance, a beautiful metaphor for education, shows burgeoning abstract plant forms beside flower-studded diagonal cano pies,-with relief panels symbolic of education, art, religion, patriotism, music and science.

The richness and diversity of Hyde Park architecture are established by these few photographs; hundreds of other doorways, equally eccentric, charming or handsome, may be seen on almost any street you choose.

5132 Woodlawn Avenue. 1897 house for Isadore Heller Frank Lloyd Wright, architect

5630 Kimbark Avenue. c. 1868

4852 Kenwood Avenue. 1892 house for Warren McArthur Frank Lloyd Wright, architect

1226-28 East 56th Street. 1904 Mann, MacNei/le, architects

5467 Woodlawn Avenue. 1929 St. Thomas Apostle School Shattuck & Layer, architects

5401-03 Woodlawn Avenue

About the Author

A long-time resident of Hyde Park, Edward Campbell is a practicing ar chitect, licensed in Illinois, and a member of the American Institute of Archjtects. He holds degrees from the University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, and California State University, Dominguez Hills.

He was the recipient of a Paul Cor nell Award in 1987, "For the Devotion of Meticulous Scholarship and Love to the Study and Explanation of Terra Cotta Decoration in Hyde Park."

An exhibit of photographs of 75 Hyde Park doorways opened at the Hyde Park Historical Society Head quarters on July 19, 1988, and con tinued through October 30. Hours are Saturdays and Sundays from 2 until 4 pm. The article presented here, Hyde Park Doorways, is taken from the ex hjbit catalog.

5210-24 Greenwood Avenue. 1903

J. C. Brampton, architect

1329 East 57th Street. 1987

Published by

The Hyde Park Historical Society 5529 South Lake Park Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637

Octa ber, 1988

Block Family Contribution to HPHS Archives

Stephen A. Treffman

HPHS Archivist

Jean Block loved architecture and Chicago history, especially that of Hyde Park. Her classic monographs on Hyde Park houses and the buildings of the University of Chicago reflected that passion. So also did her devotion to the Hyde Park Historical Society and a personal collection of books and artifacts related to Chicago. After Jean's death, her daughter, Elizabeth Kuklick and her son, William Block, graciously donated a significant portion of her papers, collectables, and books related to Chicago and Hyde Park history to our Society and its archives. A result is that those archives, which Jean originally organized and cared for until shortly before her death, have been significantly enhanced.

Included in the gift are the note cards Jean accumulated in the course of her research for Hyde Park Houses: An Informal History, 1856-1910 (1978) and The Uses of Gothic: Planning and Building the Campus of The University of Chicago (1983). Many of these cards contain information that does not appear in those books. In addition, the original large format negatives and prints of the homes pictured in Hyde Park Houses have been given to the Society. These

photographs had been produced by Jean's son, the late Samuel W. Block, Jr.

At the time of her death, Jean was engaged in research on Hyde Park's apartment buildings and had assembled a catalog of some 350 buildings, noting their dates and costs of construction, architects, and original developers. This list will become part of our archives and the Society is considering the possibility of publishing it.

Dozens of books have been added to our library through the Block family gift. These additions include such classics as the 1889 edition of the charter and membership list of the Washington Park Club Race Track, A. T. Andreas' three volume History of Chicago (1884), and P. Gilbert and C. L. Bryson 's Chicago and its Makers (1929). Several books on the World's Columbian Exposition in Jean's collection supplement another recent gift to the Society from Muriel Beadle, one of its former presidents, which also included books on the Exposition. The Society is beginning to amass a significant collection of published material on the Fair.

Postcards depicting images of Chicago, Washington and Jackson Parks, Hyde Park, White City, and the University of

Chicago, most of them published prior to 1920, were also collected by Jean. This 400-card collection was part of the Block family gift to the Society. Included in the collection are the views pictured in this issue of the newsletter. One is an unusual so-called "real photo" view of the Hyde Park Hotel at 51st and Lake Park postmarked October 2, 1911. Another, dating from the same period, depicts the West Board Walk of the White City amusement park, which was located in a thirteen-acre area bounded by 63rd and 66th Streets and by Calumet Avenue and what is now Martin Luther King, Jr.

Drive.

Finally, a set of ten pieces of dinnerware featuring scenes of buildings on the University of Chicago campus were included in the Block family donation to the Society. These plates were manufactured by the English firm of Copeland Spode in 1931.

In the months ahead, these donations will be integrated into the archives.

Society members interested in volunteering to assist with archival processing may do so by writing to the Society.

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Memorial Fund A wards Teacher Grants

A memorial fund, "The Julie Paynter Teacher Awards", has been established for Julie Borst Paynter, who died March 25, 1988, by her family and friends. The fund is being administered by HPHS. All 1988 grantees are teachers or students in the Social Studies Department of the Hyde Park Career Academy. Mrs.

Paynter was an alumna of Hyde Park High School and had been a teacher with special interest and talent in expanding her students' civic awareness.

Victor Kader was given an award to begin a culture library and resource center at the Academy. Maura Donnelly was given an award to supplement her Fulbright grant for a trip to Venezuela to develop curriculum with the Association of Teachers of Latin American Studies.

George Milkowski received a grant to take a computer course to facilitate his students' use of computers in the Social Studies lab. Theresa Perry was given an award for the purchase of two volumes of the "International Library of Afro American Life and History" to be stored in the Social Studies Lab.

Two students whose exhibits went on to the city History Fair were given awards.

They are seniors Tracie Cook and Stephanie Williams.

Contributions to the fund and applications for grants may be made through the Society.

What Do You Know About Midway Gardens?

HPHS member Mildred Williams asks fellow members and friends for any information they might have on Midway Gardens. Built in 1914 by Frank Wright and later called Edelweiss Gardens

(1916-20), and Midway Dancing Gradens (1921-28), it stood at 60th and Cottage Grove.

Any printed information or other recollections would be helpful. She says she has found no snapshots, programs, souvenirs, details of architecture or of performing artists.

We hope some of our members can help. Write Mildred at 5427 Hyde Park Blvd. 60615.

HYDE PARK

HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ltlt®rr

Volume 11, Numbers 1 and 2 Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

March, 1989

1889 - 1989

One Hundred Years of Hyde Park in Chicago

The story of the annexation of Hyde Park is told concisely and wonderfully well in Jean Block's book, Hyde Park Houses. The story begins well before 1889 with much discussion and many meetings and certainly with many columns of print in THE HYDE PARK HERALD. In the spring of 1887, annexation was approved by voters in northern section

of Hyde Park Village but it was shortly declared invalid by the Illinois Supreme Court.

However on June 28, 1889, despite the continuing efforts of many to establish a city government for Hyde Park, and the opposition to change by others, annexation was approved by voters - though the area of present day Hyde Park-Kenwood voted against it.

Some excerpts from THE HYDE PARK HERALD chronicle these events.

October 14, 1887:

The total indebtedness of Hyde Park:

$434,000; indebtedness of Chicago

$19,000,000. Chicago says, "We will help you pay your debts." YOU help US pay ours!!

October 21, 1887:

We have been wondering for some time why Mayor Roche (Chicago's Mayor) doesn't turn the big bullies off the police force. Last week, a big Irish bully, who weighs at 180 pounds, attacked a little old man at least 70 years of age, and beat him unmercifully, for no crime, except he did not move fast enough to suit the bully.

This was done in the presence of a score of people, and when a gentleman expostulated with the policeman and begged him to stop beating the old man, he turned on him and after clubbing him severely, arrested him for interfering with an officer.

Great Scott!! Don't you want to be annexed to the city?

Do you want your taxes increased? Annex!

Do you want to help pay the

$19,000,000 the city owes? Annex!

Vote a straight Republican ticket, without annexation and be happy!

November 18, 1887:

The city (Chicago) officers say it will be at least three (3) years before any improvements can be undertaken in Hyde Park, on account of the large amount of work to be done in the city already ordered. We hope that the good people of Hyde Park, who are in favor of annexation, will recede from their position and let the Saloon Keepers Association fight the battle, for improvements we must have, and that at once!

Some of the saloon keepers are just jubilant and boastful over their annexation victory. Very well gentlemen; we concede you the victory; now get the spoils if you can!

December 9, 1987:

Some of the annexationists are so confident that the city is going to give them a large amount of improvements for nothing, that they are even expecting to have their homes painted at city

expense!!

We have always been and are now opposed to annexation, but humbly acquiese to the will of the people and will endeavor to make as loyal subjects to the city as we have been to Hyde Park, keeping ever in mind that our new situations are dangerous.

February 3, 1888:

Justice Ford, of Cottage Grove Avenue, near 39th Street, has been made Police Magistrate by Mayor Roche. Now the query is being made by those justices who worked so hard to hurl their town into the vortex of Annexation, what are we to have, why gentlemen you have received your reward. It was a privilege of falling after you had shook yourselves off.

Be content.

June 22, 1888:

"Saloon Keeper" writes to The Herald to know how to defeat the movement to close saloons on Sundays. The Herald responds:

The only way we can see for you is to get annexed to Chicago. Trust your interests in the hands of Appleton, Whelan, and Co. and you will not only run on Sundays but you may crowd your saloons up against our schools and churches. That is your only chance. As long as we are under village government, the fanatical idea of a "Sabbath for rest" will likely prevail. Get into line again for annexation again as soon as you can!

Annexation means the abolishing of our prohibitory districts and saloons scattered all over our town!

The Hyde Park Historical Society Centennial Gala

Our Annual Dinner Meeting on March 11th, took us back to 1889, the year that Hyde Park was finally annexed to Chicago. Strolling through Yesterday's Main Street in their Victorian finery, enjoying dinner in the shadow of the woolly mammoth in the South Court of the Museum of Science and Industry, our members and guests celebrated the centennial of that momentous vote.

Kitty Picken, chairman of the Centennial Gala, and Charlotte Vickstrom serenade the assembly with the theme song of many voters, "I Don't Care. "

Rita Picken and Vic Obenhaus discuss the pros and cons of annexation.

Colonel Jay Mulberry considers annexation advice from Young Abe (Zeus) Preckwinkle.

Page2

Peggy Wick and Ed and Eleanor Campbell meet at Finnegans to await the election results.

Rebecca Janowitz and Paul Collard slip away to Finnegans for a sarsaparilla.

Anne Stevens and John McDermott recount "The Annexation Anxieties of Hyde Park. "

Alta Blakely window shops after casting her vote either Jor or against annexation - she won't tell!

The United Church Celebrates Its Centennial Building

The Hyde Park Presbyterian Church - now the United Church of Hyde Park

By Carol Bradford

Among the centennials being celebrated in this "Year of Hyde Park" is that of the oldest church building in Hyde Park, the home of the United Church of Hyde Park at 53rd Street and Blackstone Avenue. The structure was built by the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church in 1889, over the strenuous objection of a prominent member, namely, Paul Cornell.

In the beginning, Paul Cornell developed a village called Hyde Park out of barren, swampy land south of a larger town called Chicago. He donated a small plat of land and had built on it a small wood frame chapel for the purpose of housing services of Christian worship. The Hyde Park Presbyterian Church was formally organized in May, 1860, and continued to worship in the wood chapel until 1869, when they moved into a handsome stone church which the congregation built at 53rd and Blackstone.

continued on page 3

March, 1989

The old manse, built in the 1880's, demolished in 1962

The Trustees

Paul Cornell

George Bogue, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, was a charter member of Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, transferring his membership from North East Congregational of Chicago on May 6, 1860.

Walter C. Nelson joined on profession of faith on March 5, 1874. He lived at 5120 Harper and was a prominent real estate developer. He built several multiple unit buildings, including those at 5701-09 Kenwood, 5723-27 Kenwood, 5722-28 Dorchester and 1355-61 East 57th Street.

John C. Welling and his wife, Charlotte, transferred membership from Second Presbyterian of Chicago on March 1, 1878. He was a vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad, and lived at 4950 Greenwood.

William C. Ott and his wife, Nancy, joined the church on June 4, 1880, on transfer from Unjon Park Congregational in Chicago. They lived at 5146 Harper. It is recorded that Mr. Ott always carved the turkey at church dinners.

Leslie Lewis transferred from First Presbyterian of Waukegan, Illinois, on February 29, 1884. He lived at 5605 Dorchester and was Superintendent of the Hyde Park Schools. In later years, after annexation, he was principal of Kozminski School until his retirement. He later

joined the South Park Congregational Church and was responsible for the

preservation of historic records of that church.

WiJljam H. Ray and his wife, Martha H., also transferred from First Presbyterian of Waukegan on February 29, 1884. He was principal of Hyde Park High School until his death on July 30, 1889, at age 31. A large stained glass window, inscribed "Service" was placed in the new fellowship hall in his memory. The elementary school at 56th and Kimbark is named for him.

Henry H. Belfield and his wife, Anne, were transferred from Third Presbyterian of Chicago on October 19, 1884. He was on the faculty of the Unjversity of Chicago in later years and the

Laboratory School's Belfield Hall bears his name. He lived in the duplex at 5726-28 Blackstone.

John B. Lord and his wife, Annie E., also transferred from Third Presbyterian of Chicago, on November 30, 1886. They lived at 4857 Greenwood. He was president of Ayer and Ord Tie Company, which manufactured railroad ties.

Robert Stuart joined the church on June 5, 1887. He lived at 5206 Dorchester.

Sources: Membership records of Hyde Park Presbyterian Church Jean Block. Hyde Park Houses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I 978.

William H. Ray

William C. Ott

Page2

Above - The small frame chapel for Christian worship built by Paul Cornell Left - United Church interior

continued from Page I

The ensuing twenty years brought tremendous growth and prosperity to the community and the church. By 1888, there was talk of building a new, larger structure. The Board of Trustees began to consider various options and sought plans from local architects. At the annual congregational meeting in early 1889, the trustees proposed that a new structure be built on the site of the existing building, according to a proposal by architect, Gregory Vigeant. The old building was to be dismantled and some of the materials used in the new church. The total cost was not to exceed $35,000, excluding the purchase of an organ. Paul Cornell offered a substitute motion that "the present church edifice be enlarged according to the original design, which was to add a transept thereto. Which motion was put and lost. The original motion, to adopt said report of the Trustees, was then put and carried." Additional members were appointed to the Finance Committee. Mr. Cornell proposed another motion that potential

contributors be asked whether they prefer a new building or an addition to the

existing building. The members voted to table this motion, and the meeting was adjourned.

(From the Minutes of the Annual Meeting, Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, February 13, 1889)

Despite the lack of support for his proposal, Paul Cornell was not ready to give up. On April 17, 1889, he filed suit against the trustees and secured an injunction to stop construction of the new building. Though we have no record of the original suit, the trustees' sworn testimony in response suggests that Cornell claimed that his longstanding membership and contributions gave him special standing, that the 1869 building was a landmark to be preserved and charged that the trustees had threatened

to resign if their plan were not adopted.

The trustees responded that Cornell had no more standing in the court "than is common to all the other members of said church." They said the 1869 building was "plain and ordinary, [the] steeple is

more dangerous than ornamental, and is liable to be blown down, as has already

been the case.'' They denied any threat or coercion of the congregation, saying that " opportunity was given to all

persons, but particularly to complainant, to plead, beg, and threaten, all of which complainant thoroughly did, and when vote was taken, the action of the trustees was ratified by an almost unanimous vote, there being but a few votes against it, perhaps not to exceed half a dozen."

(From record of Case #121822, Superior Court of Cook County, 1889).

In the end, the injunction was lifted, construction proceeded, and the first wor ship service in the new sanctuary was held January 5, 1890. Paul Cornell left the Presbyterian Church and became a charter member of Hyde Park Methodist Church, which was organized in September, 1889. It is ironic that eighty years later, those two denominations were part of a merger (along with Hyde Park Congregational Church) which formed the United Church of Hyde Park.

The author wishes to thank Frank Schneider for his assistance in obtaining the Circuit Court records of this matter.

Page3

From The Fiftieth Anniversary Book

Hyde Park Presbyterian Church 1860 - 1910

The present church edifice ... is it not a typical outgrowth of Protestantism as shown in its architecture? Not now, as formerly, is it sought to embody the reverence and godly gratitude of the community by an edifice of costly splendor ...This church edjfice is designed to afford helpful facilities for every function of an active church. We have a large auditorium of perfect acoustic properties, a large lecture and Sunday School room, many convenient class rooms for Bible Study, serving rooms for the social entertainments, a special place for little children, and ladies' parlors for all occasions.

John A. Cole, Historical Address

I am very glad I was not born when my father was. He was a Methodist minister in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. My father said that in his early days he never thought of inviting a Presbyterian pastor into his pulpit; and a Presbyterian pastor would no more think of inviting a Methodist pastor into his pulpit than be

would think of flying ... My father did not regard any young minister equipped for his job until he could "lay out" the Calvinists ... Now we are on friendly terms.

The truth is that Protestants, already bound together by the bond of love, are more a unit in the United States today than are the Roman Catholics, and especially is this true since we formed the Federation of Churches. Today, there are 33 Protestant bodies of America bound together, 16,000 ministers and nearly 20,000,000 communicants.

Rev. Charles Bayard Mitchell, D.D.

St. James M. E. Church

The program began with a group of bird songs by Mrs. Charles Robbins, after which there was an address by Mrs. P.L. Sherman, who said, in part: "In 1858 my husband and I were at the Richmond Hotel ... when we received an invitation to attend the dedication of the little Hyde Park Chapel. The day arrived and we hired a horse and buggy and drove south to the little church. On our way we stopped at Kenwood, where my husband had recently purchased ten acres of ground on Lake Avenue in the vicinity of 47th Street. 1 was chiefly impressed by the beautiful wild flowers growing on the place, especially the great clumps of white and purple phlox ... The only thing left of the beautiful trees and flowers that used

to be there is one sickly little horse

chestnut tree in the court of a flat building."

"We drove on to the little church, and the first thing that greeted our sight was the decorated gate posts ... around these posts were the most beautiful wreaths of wild flowers, as large as a wagon wheel and as thick as my arm. Inside, the church was most prettily decorated with similar wild flowers. Thl!re my memory stops. I do remember though, that before we drove home we stopped at Mrs. Paul Cornell's and she gave us the most delicious cake. The sermon and text have escaped me, but the memory of that cake remains to this day."

Reception /or the Ladies

The old Stone Church

... The Hyde Park Presbyterian Church ... was born May 6, 1860. I well remember the bright sunny morning. The little frame chapel, white with green blinds, seemed a fair structure among the oak and hazel at the northeast corner of

53rd Street and Lake Park Avenue. There rested on the gate a generous wreath of the bright wild flowers so plenty then along the paths everywhere ... My mother said, "See, there is Grandma Ryan under the trees across the street, may be she brought it." She said, "Yes, I made it for your church. I can't go inside, but Jesus came for all of us and He will bless us all alike." The woman was an Irish Catholic working whenever she could for neighbors' families. Did the humble woman give our young Calvin band a comanding example against living in a narrow creed?

Hamilton B. Bogue, in an address at

the Men's Banquet

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

5529 S. Lake Park Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Page 4 March, 1989

continued from page l

January 18, 1889:

Village Hall was packed Tuesday evening as it was never packed before. Every seat was filled early, and the hallways, aisles and corners were densely crowded by people who stood the entire evening. It was a grand response to the popular idea of city organization ....

Governor Hamilton, in taking the chair, made a graceful little speech referring to his interest in all that was for the welfare of Hyde Park and expressed his sympathy for this movement for a more efficient home government. He called on Mr. A.

G. Procter to speak on the proposition

to be submitted to the meeting for discussion. Mr. Procter said:

"We propose this evening to inaugurate a movement that has for its aim what we believe to be the best interest of Hyde Park. It is a question that concerns this community, and this community alone, and we propose that this community shall have the privilege of settling it for themselves.

"We realize the fact that we have outgrown the conditions that were anticipated by our lawmakers, when they framed the law for the government of villages; and we realize fully that the conditions before us are annexation to the city of Chicago, or a government of our own citizens ....

Public Sculptor: Lorado Taft and the Beautification of Chicago Timothy J. Garvey, University of Rlinois Press, 1988, 222 pp.

A Book Review by Devereux Bowly

If there are those who think it good policy to exchange a municipality in splendid financial condition for one that is not, they will likely oppose this project ... If there are some who are

afraid of the criticisms or influence of the Chicago press, they had better pack up now and be getting out. "

February 8, 1889:

Says a leading annexationist: "We do not want any swamp land. Sixty-seventh Street is as far as we want to annex "

Says a leading annexationist in the city: "Chicago is a doubtful Republican city, but if so much of Hyde Park as is strongly Republican, say from Thirty ninth Street to Sixty-seventh Street, is annexed, then that would make Republican success sure. The rest of the territory we do not want, as it is about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans."

To be continued ....

This is an interesting new book about one of our most famous residents, Lorado Taft, who lived and worked just south of the Midway. In the introduction the author, Timothy Garvey, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University,

acknowledges assistance from several libraries and institutions in the state, including the Hyde Park Historical Society. He must have been helped by the late Jean Block, and by Adrian Alexander, who mounted a major exhibit

on Taft a few years ago at the Society and the Chicago Public Library.

Taft took a broad view of the reason for artistic expression. He viewed public sculpture as a way of establishing values and traditions of American culture. He wrote extensively, as a contributor to the Chicago Record, the art journal Brush and Pencil, and the author of the standard work, History of American Sculpture, published in 1903.

The book discusses at length Taft's F6untain of the Great Lakes, constructed in 1913 in the south garden of the Art Institute, and financed by the first grant from the Ferguson Fund. As a Hyde Park chauvinist 1 was most interested in the material on Fountain of Time, at the west

end of the Midway, also commissioned by the Ferguson Fund in 1913, and constructed in 1922. His plans included the Fountain of Creation at the east end of the Midway, a canal down its center to connect the lagoons of Jackson and Washington Parks, Midway Bridges with sculpture for the cross streets, and a Hall of Fame including 100 statues of historical figures along the canal. None of this, of course, was realized.

It is a tragedy that at least the Fountain of Creation was never built, to complement the Fountain of Time, but we are probably lucky the rest of the plan

was not carried out. Even Daniel Burnham, a friend of Taft's from the days of the Columbian Exposition and colleague in the City Beautiful movement, ventured that the entire scheme was so massive it would prevent the work from achieving a necessary unity and only cause "visual confusion." We are fortunate to be often reminded of Taft by the Fountain of Time, and the presence in the community of his Midway Studios, although his archives and the ongoing study of his work is at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where he grew up the son of a professor.

Page 3

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1989 Paul Cornell Winners

Barry and Winnifred Sullivan are winners "for the sensitive remodeling of their house which enlivens the street with a touch of Victoriana. "

The Convenantaf Community of University Church and the Covenantaf Development Corporation receive the award "for the rehabilitation of an abandoned apartment building and extending the skills learned to other buildings in the community."

Richard Cof/ida accepts the award "for developing an urban archaeology course at Kenwood High Schoof using the site of the old landmark Bryson Hotel.

Roger and Madelon Fross accept the award "for the meticulous restoration of the exterior of their home. "

HYDE PARK

HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®W&;3Il®t1t1®1f

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue

Volume 11, Number 3 Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

Hyde Park 1889 - A Photographic Exhibit

By Margo Criscuola

1868

5417 Blackstone

Photo by Ed Campbell

September, 1989

What is left of that early Hyde Park that was annexed to the City of Chicago in 1889? A surprising amount. More than 170 buildings built before 1890 are featured in "The Look of Hyde Park," an exhibit of photographs by Edward A. Campbell. The exhibit is on display through Sept. 29 at the Hyde Park Historical Society.

Documentary photographs establish how some of the landmarks of the past looked 100 years ago. The heart of the exhibit is the collection of crisp color photographs taken by Ed over the past year. Most are straightforward, detailed "portraits" of individual buildings, with some clear views of blocks in which historical buildings are clustered. All are arranged by street, so looking through the exhibit is rather like taking a neighborhood tour - you can proceed deliberately up one block and down another, or you can skip about visiting your favorites. No fear that you won't find them; all these photographs, like any good portraits, are immediately recognizable.

Ed Campbell's work is supported by painstaking historical research. He relied on Jean Blocks' Hyde Park Houses with its "Checklist of Existing Dwellings" of those built before 1910, and checked it against Rascher's Atlas of Hyde Park (1890), which features comprehensive plats with street layouts, individual lots and houses drawn in. In questionable cases, where Block and Rascher did not agree, Mr. Campbell had a practiced eye for style and structure, developed in many photographic studies of Hyde Park, to guide him. His catalogue for the exhibit, with its historical accounts of several especially well preserved blocks such as Rosalie Villas and Hyde Park Center, makes interesting reading in its own right. Many visitors to the exhibit will probably turn directly to its "Inventory: Century Old Buildings in Hyde Park."

Yet the photographs speak eloquently for themselves. Seeing these buildings partially lifted from their modern context enables one to scan the past communities which made up Hyde Park - the suburban mansions of Kenwood, set well off from each other and from any taint of commercial activity, on their large lots; the workingmen's cottages of Hyde Park Center between 51st and 55th streets, shoulder to shoulder, yet enlivened by cheerful, small-scale details and merging with their own business districts; the fanciful shapes of Rosalie Villas; the orderly series of ample townhouses on Dorchester's 5700 block. The exhibit makes one aware that there are whole blocks in Hyde Park which preserve the looks of the past - and the ideas of the good life which shaped those looks.

And the exhibit calls attention to individual relics which are easily overlooked. My favorite discovery was a pair of houses on Kimbark near 54th, one heavily disguised with additions and remodeling, the other still showing the world a modest but unapologetically Victorian face. Among the three-story walk-ups, the modern townhouses and the highrises in which most of us live, these bits of the Hyde Park of 1889 fit in quite nicely. Ed Campbell has done us a great service by helping us to see them so clearly.

The exhibit Hyde Park 1889 will continue through September 29, 1989, at Historical Society headquarters. Hours are from 2 until 4

p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

Did you see Marshall Field's windows displaying "Images of Hyde Park, 1889" during the month of August? We were there!

Renaming Stony Island A venue

By Devereux Bow/y

The Society has announced its opposition to the proposal to rename Stony Island Avenue. In a resolution passed at its last meeting, and communicated to the Chicago City Council, the Board of Directors announced recently that it believes it would be ill advised for the city to change the name of Stony Island Avenue. It is one of only a limited number of streets in the city that describes a major physical historical site, and as such the retention of the name is important to understanding the natural history of the southeast side of Chicago.

1989 Paynter Awards To Students And Faculty

Stony Island was created many millions of years ago at about 92nd Street, a short distance east of the present Stony Island Avenue, in the area later to be known as "Pill Hill" because of the large number of doctors who lived there. Glacial action, about 10,000 to 30,000 years ago left a major limestone deposit on the site. The waters of Lake Michigan later fell about 60 feet, again exposing the rock. A limestone quarry on the site well into this century, eventually was developed for homes. The area is about 25 feet above the surrounding plain, which is unusual in the mostly level City of Chicago.

The name Stony Island Avenue is thus important historically, not only because it has identified a major street for many years, but because it serves as a reminder that the history of the area, since there has been a city here, is a mere instant, as compared to natural history.

The Julie Borst Paynter awards were continued this year under the aegis of the Hyde Park Historical Society and the family of Mrs. Paynter. In addition, the Society augmented these by making special awards to two teachers and two students in recognition of their contributions to the Metropolitan

History Fair.

The Paynter awards to teachers were made as follows:

To Linda Murray, Hyde Park Career Academy, $200 for the purchase of software for Apple computers "to provide students with another learning tool ... to enhance map, thinking, and problem solving skills.''

To Jill Wayne, Kenwood Academy,

$175, for classic films which present constitutional issues in this bicentennial year.Ms. Wayne plans "to develop ... a film series in which each film confronts an important legal or constitutional

issue ... and to expand this project to become a yearly event."

To Theresa A. Perry, Hyde Park Career Academy, $175 to help finance

passage to Senegal, West Africia for thirty students "to bring a better understanding of Africa to African-American children and to enlighten and educate our friends at home."

To Richard Kaleta, Kenwood Academy,

$150 for his ongoing project of familiarizing his students with Chicago's Loop and its famous buildings. The tour includes a questionnaire and worksheet

for each student on the location and identification of buildings and the types of architecture.

Mr. Kaleta noted in his letter of acknowledgement "The weather ... was great. The kids enjoyed themselves and I think ... feel a bit more comfortable about getting around the Loop. There was only one mishap: three of the students' worksheets blew into the Chicago River!"

To Victor Kader, Hyde Park Academy,

$175 to provide enrichment material in the Popular Culture section of the social studies lab. This is the second year Mr.

Kader has received this award whict- he uses effectively in his classes to enhance his collection. In his note of thanks he says he is preparing a curriculum guide for the teaching of 20th century United States Popular Culture which he hopes will be·published by the Chicago Board of Education. He says, "It is a thrill to see students excited about learning!"

The Hyde Park Historical Society's awards of $50 each made to students for outstanding work in history were made to Ernestine Muhammed, Hyde Park Career Academy and to Inid West,

Kenwood Academy.

Awards to teachers in the same amount went to Bonnie Tarta, Kenwood Academy "For outstanding contributions as a history teacher over many years." A similar award was made to John Bradley, Hyde Park Career Academy "In recognition of his extraordinary service

to students."

Page 2

Recapturing Hyde Park's Village History: A Contribution From the Archives

By Stephen A. Treffnian

A package containing perhaps 600 loose sheets of paper was among the material in Jean Block's estate presented to the Hyde Park Historical Society by her family. These turned out to be photocopies of a typed manuscript by an L. S. Harper dated variously from 1938 to 1939. There was contained within it no title page, no further identification of Harper, no explanation of how this document had come into being, and no hint as to where the original might lie. It was, however, a compilation of vignettes of Hyde Park history that ranged from its days as a village to the 1930's.

As processing of the Block collection progressed, an interchange of correspondence possibly providing information about the material and dating from 1986 was found in a separate folder. Mrs. Block had learned that during the 1930's, the Works Project Administration (WPA), one of the innovative New Deal programs created to deal with the Great Depression of the 1930's, bad sponsored local and regional historical studies around the country. One of the achievements of the WP A was its funding for the research that appeared in the famous guidebooks to the States published in the late I 930's and early 1940's. Apparently Mrs. Block suspected that records of WPA research on Hyde Park from that period might be found in the archives of the Library of Congress. Her inquiry to that institution brought a reply indicating that they did hold such material and would provide her with a statement as to the costs of photoreproduction. These approximately 600 sheets would appear to be the results of that contact by Mrs. Block.

An important problem with the Harper work is that it contains only limited reference to its sources of historical information. Because one cannot easily document the specific source of any portion of the study, the reliability of at least some of the information it contains is suspect. Moreover, little or no analysis was attempted by the author, resulting in the report tending to proceed without any natural conclusions. However, a close reading suggests that Harper was a long time resident of Hyde Park and was familiar with the community. While some of the ·nformation presented in Harper's work does not appear in Mrs. Block's own work, Hyde Park Houses, the latter is far superior in its cogency, organization, and sophistication.

Nonetheless, Harper's history of Hyde Park stands as a notable attempt at bringing together a wide variety of anecdotal information about this community, its early leaders and its institutions.

Village History

Harper's history attempts to sketch the growth of Hyde Park. After its incorporation in 1861, Hyde Park, reputedly the biggest village in the world, developed rapidly. In 1864, the value of Hyde Park's real property was set by its assessors at $50,000. Only six years later, in 1870, that valuation had risen to

$2,920,879. There were many horses, cows, and hogs, along with carriages and wagons and even a number of pianos valued at $5,800.

The history also contains lists of village officials. The first supervisor of the Town of Hyde Park was Paul Cornell, who served one term from 1862 to 1863 and the last president, in 1888, of what had then become the Village of Hyde Park, was John Alexander Jamison, one of the town's early settlers and a prominent judge. Henry C. Work, who is remembered today as a composer of Civil War songs and the builder of what is now the oldest house in Hyde Park, is discovered as also having been town clerk of Hyde Park from the years 1865 to 1868.

George W. Waite, a real estate investor, must have been a rather well-regarded member of the community since he held a variety of official posts throughout much of the village's history. He was town clerk in 1863, assessor from 1864 to 1869, and supervisor from 1869 to 1870. He is listed as town collector for the years 1867 to 1869 and also for most of the years after 1880 until annexation.

Political careers built before annexation apparently did not continue immediately into the new local political environment. After annexation in 1889, the village was divided along Fifty-Fifth Street and Lake Park into three wards, the 32nd, 33rd, and 34th, each of them represented by two aldermen. Of the six aldermen elected from the new wards, however, none had held office in the era of the village. The transition to a new urban era had begun.

Mr. Treff man is chairman of the Society's Archives Committee

Page 3 - September, 1989

Before 1888

5135-37 Harper

Photo by Ed Campbell

1890

4832 Ellis

Photo by Ed Campbell

Beginnings - A Series On Hyde Park Organizations

By Zeus Preckwink/e

In a city of many neighborhoods, Hyde Park-Kenwood possesses a distinct identity. Part of this can be traced to the University of Chicago; Hyde Parkers are proud to point to the many.Nobel Prize winners who have made this community their homne. However, Hyde Park is more than a college town in the city.

Hyde Park also possesses some distinctive architecture, but its reputation goes beyond the architecture. Hyde Parkers are noted for their political independence and for their strongly held and often widely divergent opinions.

Of course, Hyde Park's identity has developed over a long period and it is more than the sum of all its well-known individuals. If one looks at the organizations within Hyde Park and the issues around which they developed, one can get a better sense of the community. Issues such as urban renewal or the Vietnam War led to a number of organizations unique to Hyde Park.

Next October the Hyde Park Historical Society will begin a lecture series focusing on the creative moments in which local organizations were formed. The Blue Gargoyle Youth Agency which began with a coffee house in 1968 during the Vietnam War will be the first in this series along with The Resource Center which began its first recycling at the Gargoyle in 1970.

The history of an organization may be a nostalgic return to a past time, but it can serve some very useful functions too. The early period can give insights into the purpose of the organization, its structure, its relationship to other organizations and its funding. The reasons that an organization had for coming into existence are often related to social movements or the vision of an individual.

How an organization is able to survive often depends on bow it deals with changes in such movements and how its vision is retained. There are, of course, many organizations that make Hyde Park a unique community. Members should look for notice from HPHS regarding further programs in this series.

Page 4

Celebrating the new mural Hyde Park Herald Photo

"Wheels of Time"

By Zeus Preckwinkle

During the 1970's a number of murals were painted in the Hyde Park-Kenwood community. The viaducts underneath the Illinois Central tracks were the focal areas for much of this work. They not only had long walls that might otherwise be covered with graffiti, but they were also areas which pedestrians, commuters, and car passengers frequented. The last of these murals was completed in 1980, and the weather has slowly taken its toll.

This year in commemoration of Hyde Park's annexation centennial, Regents Park and the Clinton Company commissioned artist Barbara Westerfield to work with the community to paint "Wheels of Time" under the viaduct at Hyde Park Boulevard and Lake Park Avenue. On June 24, 1989 the mural was dedicated; and on July 13 Barbara Westerfield presented a slide/lecture at the Historical Society headquarters during which she described the mural and the planning that went

into it.

While Barbara Wester field was the artist in charge of the mural, she was quick to point out that nearly 900 people were involved in one way or another with the mural's production. Regents Park had requested that the theme of the mural be transportation in the past, present, and future and it is from this theme that the mural's title was derived. Along the wall there are more than a dozen large colorful wheels which school children in the neighborhood painted. Wheels, of course, are central to our transportation systems today but these wheels refer also to something more specific in Hyde Park's history, the Ferris Wheel from the 1893 World's Fair.

How the Ferris Wheel came to be such an important part of the mural is an interesting story in itself. Early in her planning for the mural, Ms. Westerfield talked with local educator, Mary Hynes Berry, who is an accomplished storyteller. Mary Hynes-Berry told her and later told children throughout Hyde Park - the story of her grandmother who had visited the World's Fair in 1893 as a young woman

in her 20's. The story, entitled "The Chicago Spoon", is a delightful one which tells how the Ferris Wheel carried 1,000 people at a time on its half-hour trip. Mary Hynes-Berry quotes her grandmother, "I could see what the birds see," and "There were more people there than there is corn in Iowa."

Two neighborhood young people, Madeline Klein and Angelica Hernandez, produced winning posters which were used in making the broad outline for the mural. The selection of the Ferris Wheel as a form of transportation is an interesting one. As adults we tend to think of transportation as a means of getting us

to work or carrying freight from one place

to another. The selection of the Ferris Wheel points out that transportation is also a way providing new perspectives on the world.

Because Ms. Westerfield wanted to keep writing on the mural to a minimum, she asked children to identify their work with their handprints and numerous prints can be seen in the mural. She also observed how children and adults developed a sense of the mural being their own work. In addition, there were a number of people who simply watched the production of the mural who also felt involved in it.

The site of "Wheels of Time" had, prior to April, been the site of the mural "Seasons in the City". "Seasons in the City" had been completed in 1973 under the direction of artist Nina Ward and included the four seasons portrayed by students from Ray School, Laboratory School at U. of C., Harvard-St. George, and Shoesmith. When it became clear that the mural was going to be sandblasted,

the Historical Society's newly established committee, Friends of the Murals, had color slides made to keep a record of the old mural. One panel from the mural showing children skating had been used as an illustration in a Scott Foresmen social studies text during the 70's. To show a link between the old mural and the new one, Barbara Westerfield saw that this scene was recreated in "Wheels of Time".

Page 5

Excerpts from The Hyde Park Herald

Continued from our last issue ... February 8, 1889:

We publish the following from a prominant citizen who has lived in Hyde Park ever since it was organized as a Village, knows what he is talking about, and don't want an office:

"I am decidedly of the opinion that we should have a city government at the earliest day possible. If we do not organize such a government for ourselves, the day is not far distant when we will be annexed to the City of Chicago. Our Village is now practically out of debt, while the City of Chicago has a large bonded indebtedness. Our Village has water works, paid for by special assessments, and worth about $2,000,000 with an income from water works annually, of about $100,000. We are far better able to improve our own territory than the City of Chicago would be, were we annexed. Why complicate our interests?

Respectfully yours, "Paul Cornell"

Never was a worthy cause so malevolently misrepresented by the hirelings of the Chicago press as has been the cause of independent city organization for Hyde Park - "Tax-eaters," "office seekers," "chronic kickers," "cormorants," etc., have been and are the epithets hurled at the men who desire to save Hyde Park from the domination of the greedy city hall politicians and their corrupt Common Council. Intelligent men are not deceived by such argument-the usual resort of men with a cause before which reason stands ashamed. Why

should Hyde Park surrender her autonomy? What has she to gain by passing under the yoke of the notoriously corrupt and saloon-ridden Chicago Council? How will she profit by a partnership with a city with an empty treasury and an enormous and constantly

accumulating debt? Why should she pay hundreds of thousands of dollars annually into the Chicago treasury on a very slender chance of getting back a paltry ten thousand for her local impropvements?

Why should she seek to increase her taxation by fully 33-1 /3 per cent? Why jeopardize, nay, surrender her prohibition districts at the behest of an unholy political combination whick seeks simply to use Hyde Park, her wealth and her mercantile and political greatness for the purposes of plunder and to subserve the designs of certain unscupulous satrops (SIC) in the grand army of Chicago rascality?

March 8, 1889:

The saloonkeeper is not, as a rule, a great thinker or an intellectural giant, but he is a man of power. Ambitious poUticians crawl at his feet and acknowledge his supremacy. Slow, but steady and persistent has been the growth of his power. You dare not prohibit the saloon. On the floor of the senate grave senators made haste to admit that the saloon lords are so mighty that prohibitory laws could not be enforced against them. They admitted that the saloon ought to be prohibited, but they say that the State of Illinois had not power to stand up against this American aristocracy-this class that is mightier than the law. Here then is a class that is mightier than the people, that can defy our laws, ride rough-shod over courts and treat with contempt the verdict of our judges. It is true they own a great many of our legislators by the best of

titles-they bought and paid for them. We

have no nobility, no blooded aristocrats, all people here are equal before the law, with this one exception. This on·e class are above the law-mightier than the law, the law cannot be enforced against them.

These toddy-mixers, these beer-slingers are your only American aristocrats. Law, so mighty, so puissant, is able to bring all other classes to obedience, but the saloonkeepers and bartenders cannot be made to obey the law, and for that reason tJ1e law must be made in obedience to their arrogant demands. Shame-eternal shame-to every American citizen who consents to the rule of such a vile aristocracy as this.

Quoting The Springfield News

March 22, 1889:

A man that advocates the right of a baseball club to violate the sanctity of the Sabbath by playing matched games on their grounds, to the utter disgust of the moral and religious element of the community, undoubtedly is a proper advocate of annexation, but hardly a model speaker at church festivals.

The Tribune, under the head of "Boodleism Rampant," says of the recent nominations for Aldermen: "There seems to have been a preconcerted scheme to pack the next City Council in the interest of corruption," and asks "What shall be done?"

This is one of the serious problems that Chicago has to deal with every year. The last Council was a disgrace to Sodom and now what few reputable members of the Board there were of the past seem to have been dropped to give place to the very worst and most dangerous element. That's one of the reasons, Mr. Medm, why Hyde Park prefers to stay out. We are in no danger from this source as long as we are by ourselves. Our government here is clean, honest and economical and responds to the wants of our people. If you lived in Hyde Park you would say as we do: "No annexation for us."

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

5529 S. Lake Park Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Page 6 - September, 1989

In honor of another centennial

- The French Bicentennial -

Let us look into a title French history.....

Pursuing the Plantagenets

by Kitty Picken

No Plantagenets, as far as I know, live or have ever lived in Hyde Park. So much for local history.

But this story begins in Hyde Park. One snowy afternoon, umpthing years ago, in Western Civ class at U-High, Margaret Fallers turned to me and said, "Kitty, give me a time line of English history.''

You might boggle. As far as I am concerned, it was the first and possibly the only time that a teacher really cared what I knew independent of classroom work. There'd been no homework assignments for this specific project, no note cards or crib sheets, no preparation unless six years of reading historical fiction is allowed as preparation. Mrs. Fallers knew that I knew that I could do it.

I have been pursuing the Plantagenets ever since Peter O'Toole said "Who will rid me of that meddlesome priest, " referring to Richard Burton. In other words, in the movie Becket in the mid 60s. (By the way, the 60s are history now. Sneaky how it creeps up on us.)

I'm still pursuing Plantagenets-and it's more fun than ever.

To refresh your memories. In the 12th century, it is said, Goeffrey of Anjou stuck a branch of the bristly yellow broom plant, called in French "plantagenet", in his helmet. From then on, his family was called the Plantagenets-when members weren't being called other epithets such as "Spawn of Satan," (That's another story.)

Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (picture Peter O'Toole and Kathryn Hepburn in Lion in Winter) ventured from the heart of their holdings at Angers, Poitiers, Chinon, into the "wild west"-Windsor, London, Westminster.

They stayed there as little as possible, only sufficient for Henry to perform those tedious tasks of King of England. Then, back to Aquitaine without benefit of car phone or fax machine. No wonder King Henry crossed the English Channel at

least four times in weather no dog would swim in. The fact that he survived only added to the "Spawn of Satan" mystique.

My five hour crossing last month, from Portsmouth to Cherbourg, Normandy, a route Henry would have used, was only rough if, like me, you are not attuned to such things. The wind was brisk; the sky was blue. As a teacher, tour leader, and writer of English history, I was venturing for the first time into ''the other side of the story"-France, in pursuit of

the Plantagenets.

I found them in a golden diadem of a Norman chapel at Fontevrault Abbey near Tours. Henry, Eleanor, their son Richard Coeur de Lion and their daughter-in-law (wife of son John) Isabella of Angouleme.

The tombs are smaller than I imagined from pictures. Perhaps it's the graceful draperies in the style of carving. Maybe its the monumental stature of Henry and Eleanor in history. The tombs are

painted. At one time the colors must have been intense because they have mellowed to a soft crimson and sky blue flecked with stars. Henry clutches a sceptre; but Eleanor is reading a book. The effect is startling, as if at any moment, she'll glance up and take up life where she

left off.

In Tours, at a store dedicated to regional specialities, we found reproductions of a ring given by Henry to Eleanor with the saying "Carpe Diem." The French translate it "Profite du jour". We might say "Seize the day," but my traveling companion immediately quipped, "Go for it!" How like Eleanor!

Eleanor, remember, was wife of 2 kings (Louis Capet of France and Henry II), and mother of 2 kings (Richard and John). She outlived Henry by 15 years and made it to 82 before she died

at Fontevrault.

She was heiress of a rich countryside. This summer it was planted primarily with corn and sunflowers, dotted

with vineyards.

Henry was no slouch. He carped the diem as much as anyone. When he wasn't hopping across the channel as if it were a creek, he was insisting on greater jurisdiction for the king's courts in England. That's how he came up against Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

I've made my pilgrimage to Becket's tomb at Canterbury. This was Henry's turn. The church where he did his penance for Becket's murder is gone, but his castles remain.

We walked the monumental walls at Angers where Henry grew up and from where he administered his dukedom. We saw Chinon where Eleanor proclaimed her Court of Love. And we drank wine and dined on local melons steeped in Pernod in Poitiers.

Henry's title was King of the English, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Duke of Aquitaine, Poitou and Auverge. Geographical distinctions between England and France meant little.

It's past time that a Plantagenet chaser such as I should venture into the heartland of their realm. Henry and Eleanor would not have understood why it took so long. Neither do I.

Ah, well-Carpe Diem.

P.S. Kitty plans to lead a tour to the Land of the Plantagenets in Spring

of 1990.

Page 7

DO YOU REMEMBER ..............

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anuaAv lfJBd a)fB'J ·s 6,ss

AJ.l!:JOS (B:J!JOJS!H )fJBd apAff

. . . Eggers Grocery at the northeast corner of 55th and Dorchester? Here the Brothers Egger always wore long, white aprons covering them from chin to toe, and always waited carefully on each customer. No do-it-yourself in those days!

... Mike Hanley's Tavern (saloon) on the north side of 55th Street, near Harper, with its polished mahogany bar one quarter block long? Hanley's was the students' Jimmy's in the 1930's, but the bar itself dated from the 1890's and served the workmen from the Columbian Exposition.

... The Morgan Sisters' Ballet School in the Chicago Beach Hotel? Ethel and Gertrude Morgan guided the awkward steps of Hyde Park's prospective ballerinas until the hotel was demolished and the school moved to 67th and Jeffrey. Each spring the school held an

outdoor recital in the park adjacent to the old hotel. At one of those recitals HPHS member, Betty Borst, was a featured dancer - to Mendelssohn's "Spring Song", under a bower of real apple blossoms!

Were you there? Don't you wish you were?

What do you remember? Send in your remembrances!

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Ncew§licetrtrcen

Volume 12, Number 1 and 2 Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue

Open Sat. 2-4PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

May,1990

Paul Cornell Award Winner Restoration Miracle!

by Margo Criscuola

Suzanne McGarry and her husband,

Photo by Edward Campbell

Over the years, however, other features were added: metal cabinetry in the kitchen,

ing and a lot of cosmetic changes," she says. These included removing the extra staircase and a third-floor kitchen left from the rooming house and four months of stripping the purple and white paint that was some "crazy's" idea of elegance, to reveal handsome woodwork, including the oak staircase, carved oak parlor doors, and ornate cornices for the parlor windows. The doors were given new stained-glass windows to replace those long gone.

Naturally, there were repairs, re-siding, and then painting and papering throughout.

The aim was not to restore to museum

Robert Kulovitz, had known exactly what they were looking for-a great old house at a price that would allow them to do a thorough rehabilitation-but they looked in vain for quite a while. It seemed that there was not much left in the Hyde Park Kenwood area.

The three-story frame house at 5134 Woodlawn had waited a while, too. Built before 1889, the 12-plus room house is rich in architectural detail. Outside, a wide porch, double front doors, and wide windows suggest solid comfort, while Carpenter's Gothic turnings, bays, a many gabled roof and a turret lend a touch of romance. Inside, a magnificent oak staircase is lit by a stained glass window; fireplaces suggest French chateaux; the turret shelters what might have been a miniature ballroom. Suzanne's first reaction to the realtor's ad was, "Why dido't I see this?"

and a second kitchen in the midst of the third-floor hall; a rickety third staircase, and layers and layers of paint-purple and white. For after the confident luxury of its early owners, the house shared the decline of Hyde Park. It was subdivided as a rooming house, then left to run down. "Nothing was done to it for twenty-five years," estimates Suzanne.

The Kulovitz brought to their project a lot of expertise. Suzanne grew up in real estate, and in her work for K and G

Management has seen many a renovation, so she felt she knew both how to assess the house and how to organize the work on it. It isn't so hard, she believes, "if you have a husband who can put things together."

The layout was great, with generous living, dining and family rooms on the first floor, and a kitchen with ahead-of-its-time spaciousness. There were "a little rearrang-

like original condition, but to make a com fortable family home. Light fixtures had to be replaced. Some later additions, such as glass doors to the family room, and knotty pine paneling in the third-floor study, were kept as a matter of course. Most of the house was carpeted for both comfort and convenience - and the strong teal-blue chosen for the carpet helps tie together the three floors. And contemporary notes were added, most strongly in the light, convenient kitchen and the deck with hot tub that links together the replaced garage and back porch. The only drawback to the house Suzanne finds is that familiar problem, "lack of closet space."

The blend of old and new, of restoration and renovation, is very apt for a recipient of the Paul Cornell Award; it shows how satisfying an historic house can be for contemporary living.

) y ,-r

Notes from the Archives

by Stephen Treffman

Hyde Park's First Alderman. It seems that there was one man whose political career did span the years before and after Hyde Park's annexation to Chicago.

William R. Kerr, an insurance company executive and real estate investor, was elected Hyde Park's Village Collector in 1888. He was among those who favored annexation and helped bring that issue to a public referendum. After annexation, Kerr was elected alderman, along with William

C. Kinney, of the then 32nd Ward, which encompassed the area from 55th Street north to 39th Street and from State Street east to the lake. Kerr was chairman of the city council's World's Fair Committee.

Chicago and Its Makers credits Kerr with having played an important role in bringing the World's Columbian Exposition to Chicago and in obtaining a $5,000,000 appropriation from the lliinois legislature to help fund the fair. He was selected chief manager of the Exposition's "Chicago Day," an event which drew over 700,000 adJnis sions, the largest attendance recorded during the fair. Kerr served as alderman for five years and then turned his attention to the development of West Pullman. He died in 1920 at the age of 73. We are grateful to Donald R. Kerr, the alderman's grandson, born in Hyde Park but now living in Tucson, Arizona, for providing us with some of the sources for this report.

Photographs: The Society is always interested in receiving donations of good quality print and slide photographs of the Hyde Park-Kenwood community for its archives. We are, of course, eager to have images that document the physical appear ance of the community through the years, such as street scenes and exterior and interior views of buildings and stores, particularly those dating from pre-urban renewal days. We also welcome photo graphs of individuals and groups that have played prominent or representative roles in the community's life.

A substantial and very significant collection of negatives of photographs taken of Hyde Park/Kenwood during the days of urban renewal has recently been donated to our archives by Nancy Campbell Hays. Ms. Hays, a well-known and still very profes-

May 1990- page 2

sionally active photographer in our commu nity, has had her work featured in the Hyde Park Herald for many years. The negatives are primarily interior and exterior views of buildings and homes that were demolished during the years 1959 through 1962.

We also recently received a gift from

another local professional photographer, Peter Weil, of some forty photographs of a variety of events, local scenes, and person alities taken by him and the late Rus Arnold, who was also a prominent professional photographer active in Hyde Park. Most of the views appear to date from the 1950s and

1960's. A large collection of Arnold's photographs may be found in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society.

Our archives contain very few formal photographs of political personalities from any period in Hyde Park's history. If you have photographs or other material that you believe might be appropriate for the Society's collection and that you would like to donate, please write to the Society's headquarters or contact our Society's archivist, Stephen Treffman, at 5749 S. Kenwood, Chicago IL 60637.

by Astrid Fuller, from a talk to the Society - March, 1990.

I/' fl r,4-1.,I 0

The Spirit of Hyde Park

The Mural

community. Two subsequent letters to the editor called for a design change.

I was most concerned, particularly because the I. C. had stipulated in its contract that any controversial mural would have to be removed. I phoned the parents of two of the children who had worked with me, Mr. George Anastoplo and Mrs. Sandra Jacobson, to voice my concerns. After consulting with other parents, neighbors and friends, it was decided that we should ignore the article, that the reaction was atypical, and that the issue would subside. Passers by, but for a handful, were very positive in their remarks to me.

Hyde Parker Carole Simpson, Channel 5 newscaster, aired the controversy in a 4 or 5 minute evening news report on August 8th, interviewing Mr. Forwalter and me. She ended her coverage by saying: "Some

In the summer of 1972, I worked as a volunteer on Caryl Yasko's 55th Street Illinois Central underpass mural entitled "Under City Stone." I was subsequently invited to be a member of the Chicago Mural Group, a multi-socio, multi-national group of artists. In the late fall of 1972, Helaine Billings, Public Relations Director of the Southeast Chicago Commission, asked me to paint the 57th Street underpass and I readily accepted. She had already approached merchants and residents located near the site to provide funds for the mural. The Chicago Mural Group, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, would provide my salary; the Illinois Central would provide insurance.

In the spring of 1973, I submitted a

detailed scale drawing of my proposed mural. It hung in Mr. Winston Kennedy's realty office for several weeks, where it was reviewed by the prospective sponsors. My plan was received, I was told, with enthusi asm and with no reservations.

The mural wall is 207.5 feet long. The height underneath the viaduct itself is 10 feet while the eastern panels, curving out into the open air, are approximately 11 feet high. An additional 2 to 3 feet of decorative grill work, which was incorporated into the design, top these outside panels. In all the wall is approximately 2,100 square feet.

At the direction of Marshall Korshak,who was the 5th ward committeeman at the time, the city steam cleaned, wire brushed, and primed the wall. We were ready to begin at the end of June.

I then chalk-lined a grid of one-foot squares. My design was on a scale of 1/2 inch per foot of wall, and with this guide I put up my sketch in charcoal and sealed it

with a fixative. This phase was completed by mid-July.

Fifteen neighborhood children, most of them from 10 to 12 years old, volunteered to help me. Under my direction they did the entire next phase: putting in all the flat colors and working source of light. They were extremely dedicated and hardworking, so eager that I divided them into a morning and afternoon crew so that each could get sufficient attention. This phase was completed toward the end of August though my work continued - often at night, under the well lit viaduct, with the protection of Bill Walker, my mentor and a seminal leader in the mural movement in the United States - into the cold of autumn, as compositional corrections and finishing were accom plished. The mural was completed on November 13, 1973.

(The mural depicts Hyde Park history in many of its various manifestations: poverty and wealth, racism and the struggle for civil rights, the unrest caused by urban renewal and the efforts of the community to stabilize and integrate. It records events - the 1893 World's Fair, removal of the Nike sights, protests against a highway in Jackson Park - and it acknowledges institutions - the University of Chicago, the Chicago Children's Choir, the Court Theater, the architectural heritage of Hyde Park - which have distinguished our community. Ed.)

Public response to the mural was aston ishing beginning with the reaction of John Forwalter, art, book, and social critic for the community's major newspaper, The Hyde Park Herald. On July 25th, he wrote that seven of the ten mural panels were full of conflict and violence and that no public or private group had the right to so picture the

people would say that even though this mural is only half-fmished, it is already a success for it makes people think."

I was subsequently interviewed by the Chicago Tribune and a favorable article appeared on August 16th. Meanwhile the Illinois Central laid my fears to rest by publicizing the mural in its commuter bulletin and national magazine. Their only complaint - made privately - was that they were not in the mural though they had played a major part in Hyde Park's early development!

On August 17th, as I was being inter viewed in front of the mural by Pat Brown of Channel 7 news, an elderly woman passing by told him at length of her disapproval of my "violent, immature mural." His news report that evening made no mention of her dissension. Rather the segment was introduced by Len O'Connor, then a Hyde Park resident, as a "wall of hope," followed by a montage of Hyde Park and the mural. I spoke of my deep affection and respect for my community. He described me as "trying to record in the mural the heartbeat of mankind in commu nity."

City wide interest in the mural was such that it became a tourist attraction. Sightsee ing buses were re-routed, students from the University of Chicago, Roosevelt Univer sity, and other schools used me or the mural for class projects, and there was further television and press coverage. The mural, or panels from the mural, have been featured in books and articles and in photo exhibits.

In all, it was a demanding, lively, educa tional experience. Hyde Park lived up to its reputation of being a community that gets involved.

May 1990- page 3

The Curious Case of Dr. Adamson B. Newkirk If pr i

by Carol Bradford

Adamson Bentley Newkirk, M.D. and his wife, Lucy M., probably came to Hyde Park in 1874. He was 54 years of age at the time, and she was 48. They joined the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church by letter of transfer from First Congregational Church of Memphis, Tennessee. Their oldest child, Clara Barker Newkirk also joined by transfer in early 1875. Three children: Jennie C., John N., and Adamson B., Jr., joined by profession of faith in January, 1877. A son, Joseph T.,joined by profession in March, 1880, and the youngest child, Malvina A., joined and was baptized in August, 1881. Common practice at the time was for children to become full members of the church at about age 12.

The Newkirk family may have been related to the Barker family who were already members of the church. Joseph N. Barker and his wife, Frances, had joined the Hyde Park church in February, 1872, by transfer from First Presbyterian of Chicago, which was located downtown at that time. (Note that this move occurred shortly after The Great Chicago Fire of October, 1871, at which time many Chicago residents migrated to the suburb of Hyde Park.) Joseph served as an elder of the Hyde Park church from July, 1872 until his death in May, 1902. He was the Sunday School Superintendent from 1875 to 1878. Mrs.

Barker was active as an officer of the Women's Foreign and Home Missionary Societies. The Barkers lived at first on Lake Park Avenue, and then in the mid 1880's built a house at 5000 South Greenwood, which still stands. A relationship between the two families is suggested by the middle name, Barker, being given to the Newkirk's first child, and by the fact that both families had a daughter named Malvina A. In addition, Dr. and Mrs. Newkirk are buried in the Barker family plot at Oak Woods Cemetery.

The eldest son, John, was apparently the

first to leave home, transferring his church membership to Sedalia, Missouri, in September, 1879. The following spring, Adamson, Jr. transferred his membership to First Presbyterian of Falls City, Nebraska. In November, 1882, Jennie also transferred to Falls City, a town now of about 5000 people, located in the far southwest comer of the state. Just a month later, on Decem ber 18, 1882, their mother, Lucy Newkirk, died of pneumonia and was buried in the lot owned by Joseph N. Barker at Oak Woods.

May 1990- page 4

The Session (governing body) Records of the church show that at a meeting held on April 14, 1882 "Mr. Ferdinand Mayers appeared before the session and preferred charges against Adamson B. Newkirk of taking improper liberties with girls. His statement was supported by letters from other parties The Committee on Dr.

Newkirk's case reported that he admitted improper conduct, but said that nothing criminal was intended; Elder [Joseph N.] Barker said that Dr. Newkirk consented to waive formalities and expressed a desire to proceed at any time the session chose." They scheduled a meeting for two weeks later to further consider the charges.

The Session was operating in this matter under the Rules of Discipline of the Presbyterian Church, which have remained basically unchanged since their origin in Scotland in the early years of the Reforma tion Era of the 16th Century. In those days, the church, rather the the civil government, was the guardian of moral behavior, and it was not uncommon for allegations of immoral conduct to be brought to the attention of the elders of the church for actual trial, determination of guilt or innocence, and punishment. The censures available are rebuke, temporary exclusion (from office, membership, and participation in the sacraments), and removal. In the late 19th Century church membership was an essential part of one's personal and social life. To be barred from the sacraments was a very visible act which would immediately identify a person as not being in good standing in the church. The community might easily make the assumption that such a person had been found guilty of immoral conduct.

Dr. Newkirk did not appear at the meeting held on April 27, 1883, having given his consent for the Session to proceed without him. "A communication from Dr. Newkirk was then read; following which each member of the session expressed his views at length The paper presented by Dr.

Newkirk admits the offense charged and offers some explanations designed to mitigate the gravity of the offense." The session decided that it could not decide the gravity of the offense "without a careful examination of witnesses. Such an examina tion would, on our judgment, be of serious injury to the girls, and its evil effects would more that counterbalance any good that might be expected to result. It is the judgment of the session that Dr. Newkirk be suspended from the privileges of the church until such time as the session may deem it wise to restore him. It is not deemed wise to publish this judgment farther than to the parties making complaint." The members of the Session at the time were Pastor, Rev. E.

C. Ray, and Elders Hassan Hopkins, Homer

N. Hibbard, Joseph N. Barker, George Stewart, John C. Welling, and William Olmsted. All were business and profes sional men who would probably be considered part of the elite of Hyde Park.

When next we hear of Dr. Newkirk it is in a letter addressed to the Session, written from Falls City, Nebraska on November 19, 1883. The letter was presented and discussed at the Session meeting held on December 1, 1883. In it, Dr. Newkirk "respectfully and strenuously" urged them to consider whether the time had not already come for them to restore him to the privileges of the church and grant a Jetter of dismissal to the First Presbyterian Church of Falls City. He reminded them "that the only guilt-which I admitted was 'playful improprieties,' without thought of commit ting an offense."

"I sincerely repented and do repent of the

wrong which I thus unintentionally did and only realized through the above charges and its attendant circumstances. Earnestly and humbly did I ask forgiveness......

"When my sentence was realized by me I felt it to be exceedingly severe; as time goes on I feel more and more strongly the severity of my punishment. I have tried to bear it with Christian patience and now after the endurance of it for over seven months, I am impelled to urge you, for the sake of Christian charity--0f Christian justice to terminate my punishment"...

continued on next page

Newkirk- continued

After consideration, the Session voted to restore him and the clerk was directed to inform Dr. Newkirk of the action.

Exactly one week later, on December 18, 1883 (the first anniversary of his wife's death) Adamson B. Newkirk died. The cemetery record shows "accident-thrown from buggy" as the cause of death. He was buried on December 22, next to his wife in the Barker plot at Oak Woods. It is doubtful that he had received notice of his reinstate ment by the Hyde Park church elders by that time. One can only speculate whether his

DO YOU REMEMBER

PARKER'S STORE on the south west comer of Kenwood and 55th Street? It was

. ..

death was truly accidental.

About a year later, Clara and the two youngest children, Joseph and Malvina, joined Jennie and Adamson Jr. in Falls City, transferring church membership there in March, 1885. Clara returned to Hyde Park and rejoined Hyde Park Presbyterian on November 27, 1889. Her name is listed in the church directory of 1900, residing at 5313 Washington (Blackstone) Avenue. In December, 1903, she transferred her membership to First Presbyterian Church of Los Angeles, California. Today there are no Newkirks listed in the telephone directories of Hyde Park or Falls City.

••••••••••••••••••

REFERENCES:

All quotations are from the Session Records of the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, 1448 East 53rd Street, Chicago, IL.

Jean Block: Hyde Park Houses, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Book of Order Presbyterian Church (USA), Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 1988.

The author wishes to thank Soubretta Skyles for her assistance in locating records at Oak Woods Cemetery of Chicago, and Robert Worley, Harold Blake Walker Professor of Pastoral Theology and Chief Academic Officer at McCormick Theologi cal Seminary, for sharing his knowledge of Presbyterian polity and practice.

owned by a brother and two sisters. They sold yard goods, trimmings, buttons, hooks and eyes, and such sundries. One bought a paper of common pins, not pins in a plastic box.

At the south end of the store, on a balcony, was the store office. Overhead, from the counter on the floor below to the balcony, was an electric line. When a customer paid for whatever was bought, the money and the bill were placed in a small receptacle, barrel-shaped and about 3 to 4 inches long and 2 inches in diameter, and placed on the line where it quickly zipped to the balcony. There change was made and quickly zipped back to the sales person who completed the transaction, wrapping the purchase in paper for the buyer.

ELISE RUNYAN'S SHOP on the south side of 53rd Street between Dorchester and Kirnbark? This lovely shop featured ladies' ready-to-wear: dresses, suits, hats, lingerie, hosiery - all of high quality. Elise, the shop owner, always wore beautiful, large brimmed picture hats, whether in the shop or outside. She was tall and attractive, regal looking. Miss Fickensher, one of her sales persons, made trips to New York to buy merchandise for the shop.

GRACE VAUGHAN'S HAT SHOP,

JUST off 53rd Street on Dorchester? Here hats were made or redecorated, whether for summer or winter. Lola Lee was one of her assistants. In the 192O's the cloche hat was popular and fashionable.

HARRIS GROCERY MARKET

MARKET, on 55th Street between Dorch ester and Blackstone? Early in the morning, one of the brothers would go to the markets on State Street and vicinity to buy fresh vegetables, fruit, meat and fish. When the store opened, these were all in place. They advertised "motor delivery" and deliveries to their patrons were made daily.

- Ida DePencier

AND DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN...

WOLF'S TOY STORE, on the south east comer of 55th and Kenwood was the F.A.O. SHWARTZofHydePark(circa 1936)? Its cavernous interior, which was only lighted when a customer approached, contained so many toys that choosing a gift took at least an hour - or more. It was a sad day when Urban Renewal forced Madame Wolf to telescope her emporium into the small quarters on the north side of 55th near the University Bank.

ICE SKATING UNDER THE NORTH

STANDS OF STAGG FIELD flourished to the musical strains of Strauss waltzes - on records, of course. We were all the epitome of grace...until we fell!

- Betty Borst

Can you help?

May 1990- page 5

Gentlemen:

HOWARD F. LEWIS

500 SPANISH FORT BLVD., NO 40

SPANISH FORT, ALABAMA 36527

March 8, 1990

Correspondence

Gentlemen:

I am currently wrapping-up my research concerning Asbury W. Buckley, a tum of the century architect. According to the following obituary, Mr. Buckley resided in Hyde Park for many years:

Asbury Wright Buckley, formerly well known Chicago architect, was buried yesterday at Coldwater, Mich. He passed away at his home, 5468 Hyde

Park boulevard, after two years' illness at the age of 79 years. Mr. Buckley was a resident for thirty years of Hyde Park. He is survived by his wife, three sons, and two daughters. - The Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1924, section 1,

page 10, column 2.

Following is a list of addresses from the Chicago city directories under Asbury Buckley's name:

1896 to 1904 - 5431 Madison Ave.

1905 to 1908 - 5235 Cornell Ave.

1909 to 1910- 5470 East End Ave.

1912- 5468 East End Ave.

1915 - 3967 East End Ave.

1917 - 5470 Hyde Park Blvd.

1923 - 5468 Hyde Park Blvd.

His architectural office is listed at the following addresses:

until 1902 - 345 Wabash Ave.

1903 to 1912- 26 Van Buren

1912 to 1913 - 3969 Elston Ave. 1914 - 164/6 Washington

Any further information you might have concerning Mr. Buckley and his architec tural career would be greatly appreciated. I thank you for your time and assistance.

Sincerely,

Larry J.Loyer 162 Taylor St.

Coldwater, Ml 49036

I was delighted with your picture of the house at 5135/37 Harper Avenue on p.4 of the September 1989 issue of the "Newslet ter". Our family moved from a duplex apartment just north of the Kenwood School to 5137 about the spring of 1913. The apartment building whose side you can barely see to the right, or south, of the picture was just being built when we moved there. I made friends with, to me, an elderly (probably 50) black man who, all by himself,was digging the footings for the first pour of the foundations. He would share his lunch with me and I would bring him a banana or an apple in return. He must have done the job well because, when we returned from our very small farm in Lakeside, Michigan, where we spent the summer every year, the foundations were poured and the walls were half up. I never saw my friend again.

We stayed in that house until, I think, 1915 when my sister graduated from Kenwood School. We moved to 1121 East 54th street. I attended first grade at Ken wood under Miss Brown, second grade at Kosminski, where I had eleven teachers in one year. The next fall I was enrolled at the University Elementary School now the University Lab Schools where I completed my highschool education in the class of 1925.

The Rawls-Mr./Mrs., Junior, Chuck and baby sister, occupied the other half of the Harper Avenue house-5135. Next north was the Crossette home, she was my mother's older sister-a lady of many parts. The other half of their house-to the north - was the Stone's residence. Mr. Stone was almost totally without hearing and for many years I thought this was where the term "stone deaf' originated. His son held #6 Amateur Wireless Operators licensed by the Federal Government. His antenna was atop the old Hyde Park Hotel Building. In tum, his son is now the CEO of Dukane Electron ics out in St. Charles...a very substantial supplier of electronics to the Government.

We bought the house at 5317 Greenwood when I was a freshman at U-Hi, living there until I went away to college the fall of 1925. Next, to the north of us.lived Dr. Joseph Miller, one of the City's prominent diagnos-

ticians. Next north of them was the O.T. Henkel house, he was president of the Union Stock Yards. One of his sons, Orvis junior, my age, supplied the first syllable for the "Orfer Club" a very select organization which played football, baseball and track with any other team that we could find of pre-teen age dimension. The "fer" came from Ferris White who lived at 5314 University Avenue irnrnediately back of our house on Greenwood. I will always remember Ferris coming in thru the kitchen while we were at supper and asking, "Can Uncle Bill-my father-come out to the alley and play ball?" Ferris's opinion ofmy ball playing capabilities was not of the highest!

My parents, and many of their friends, had first known each other at Hyde Park High School, then located at 57th and Ken wood, later occupied by the Thomas Apostle Parochial School. Sometime later Hyde Park Hi moved to the Ray School Building at 57th and Kimbark. My mother's maiden name was Hair. Her classmates, among whom was my father, delighted in "introduc ing" her to Matt Brush, also a classmate, later to become internationally known in fi nancial circles as "The Great Bear"of the 1929 stock market crash.

We all mourn Jean Friedberg Block's passing. She was a sprightly child, an attractive young girl growing more and more to be like her mother - one of the most attractive women I've ever met. Her older brother, Dr. Stanton A. Friedberg, was very special to me in high school and remains today as my closest friend.

Thanks for the memories.

(Signed) Howard F. Lewis Incidentally, on another page you speak

of the Morgan Sister's Ballet School at the

Chicago Beach Hotel. Mr. Bournique had his Ballroom Dancing class at the old Chicago Beach until he moved his operation to the Kenwood Club at the time of the first World War. My aunt, Merriam Crossette (mentioned above) took over at the hotel and ran what for me was a torture chamber every Wednesday afternoon. Imagine Ballroom dancing!

May 1990- page 6

Estrella A/amar greets new president Zeus Preckwinkle

/Tt41--1c. 11ff·

The Society's 1990 Annual Meeting

Meeting at International House on Saturday, January 27th, the Society elected its new officers as recommended by its Nominating Committee:

President: Zeus Preckwinkle

Vice President: Jessica Young Recording Secretary: Margo Criscuola Corresponding Secretary Betty Borst Treasurer: Edward Campbell

New members of the Board of Directors: Bert Benade Theodore Moran

Chris Coley Cassandra Smith

Mary Lewis Mildred Williams Lorraine McCoy

Jay Mulberry, outgoing President, reported to members on the state of the Society and thanked his co-workers, presenting them with lovely red roses. Board member Anne Stevens was Chairman of the annual dinner meeting and Society member John McDermott was master of ceremonies.

After Paul Cornell Awards were an nounced and recipients of Julie Paynter Grants were introduced, members were entertained by David and Barbara Currie in Mike Nichols' and Elaine May's "The Telephone" and by Roland and Helen Bailey, David Currie and Joyce Swedlund, accompanied by Forbes Shepherd, in selections from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Cornell Award Winners Suzanne McGarry and Robert Kulovitz restored a pre-1889 house.

One of the highlights of the evening was a greeting sent by Paul Cornell, grandson of Hyde Park's founder, from his home in County Waterford, Ireland, to member Len Despres on the occasion of the Annual Meeting. Len says, "So far as I know, this is the first time that a greeting or toast has

been fax'd from Ireland to a dinner of the Hyde Park Historical Society." The message reads:

Dear Hyde Parkers,

Congratulations to you all - to the officers, the helpers and the supporters and to all who make the Hyde Park Historical Society the success it is today.

We share with you the pleasure of the Society's progress and its growing benefit to the community - a very real value which it has created in Hyde Park.

Our very best wishes for continued success for the New Year and the new decade.

(Signed) Paul Cornell and Family

Architect William Latoza and Robert Nelson of the Park District accept an award for their restoration of the former Coast Guard Station.

Regents Park's Timothy Allwardt and Carrie Smith accept the Cornell Award for their sponsoring of a new mural.

May 1990- page 7

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MARK YOUR CALENDAR

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ttlt®IT

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue

Volume 12, Number 3

Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM September, 1990

The Hyde Park Historical Society Presents A Trip to Lockport

by Mary C. Lewis

Imagine a day in mid-April, 142 years ago, when you are invited to attend a gala celebration. Years of effort have been spent preparing for this day; hundreds of men have toiled in back breaking labor, over nine million dollars has been spent, and more than once the task was stopped for lack of funds. Nevertheless, after more than 20 years of planning and 12 years of construction, the goaihas been reached. A waterway link, the Illinois and Michigan (I & M) Canal, connects Illinois, its people, agriculture and industry, with the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan.

As you stand in Lockport, Illinois, the headquarters for the canal, you are among a crowd of cheering observers, celebrities and brass bands-all invited to help make this a memorable event. You glance down the new canal while the first of many boats appears in the distance. You are in Lockport on a day that heralds the start of a new era of prosper

Lockport's Gaylord Building, courtesy Illinois State Museum

ity. With the start of the I & M Canal, access to the rest of the country is greatly improved and commerce and settlement in the Midwest will grow rapidly. Now that the canal links the Gulf of Mexico's ports with those of New England, northeastern Illinois' development skyrockets. Chicago becomes the hub of the Midwest, replacing St. Louis in importance.

In fact, in the first decade following the Canal's opening, Chicago's population rises 600%. Truly, that day in 1848 bas signaled great change for everyone in the state.

Fortunately, a time machine of sorts is available for just such a trip to mid-19th century Lockport. The Hyde Park Historical Society is planning a visit to Lockport on Sunday, October 14 for a day of discovering

the area's fascinating history, preserved by various public and private agencies.

The fust stop on the itinerary is the Gaylord Building in Lockport. Constructed in several phases beginning in 1838 and including an Italianate addition built in 1859, the structure features prominent use of native dolomite limestone-a material found in several other buildings in Lockport's past, a major source of industry during the 19th century and the same material transported to Chicago to build the old Water Tower. The Gaylord Building was used for various proposes: it was fust a depot for construction materials and equipment when the I & M Canal was being built; then as the canal region became a major industrial belt, the

structure became among other things, a grain warehouse, general store, and a printing plant. The building's current name came about when it was purchased in 1878 by George Gaylord who ran a store there until his death in 1883. On the 100th anniversary of his death, Gaylord's descendants formed the Gaylord Lockport Company to restore the building and lobby for landmark status.

Today the Gaylord Building stands as a successful symbol of restoration as well as multi-functional purpose. The structure houses the I & M Canal Visitor Center, the central site of the I & M Canal National Heritage Corridor, a federally funded effort to preserve the entire region surrounding the canal; the Lockport Gallery of the Illinois

continued on page 2

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structure was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Today the 10-room museum features several elements of the canal's heyday: pictures and documents related to the canal's operation; tools and furnishings of the era; the office of the canal's chief surgeon, complete with instruments and other medical artifacts; and items in use by the

Park District which focused efforts on restoration and preparing the building for its present purpose as a museum and meeting facility for community groups. Today's visilors will findexhibits about historic Lockport and some of the church's original features: much of the glass still stands in the large south windows, and hand hewn beams, wainscoting, and some of the furnishings and flooring from 1840 also are there.

Other features await the Lockport visitor. The Pioneer Settlement, the Will County Historical Society's "open air museum," highlights life in Lockport during its peak and features a log cabin, one-room schoolhouse, tinsmith's shop, and demonstrations of folk art. The two-mile Lockport Historical Trail parallels the canal and offers visitors a chance to observe the area's natural beauty-its

State Museum, which spotlights the state's decorative, industrial, ethnographic and fine arts through exhibits and programming; and the Public Landing Restaurant. Featured on this October visit will be an exhibit of black and-white photographs of Chicago during the New Deal era, a slide talk about historic Lockport, and lunch.

The I & M Canal Museum, the next stop on the tour, was built in 1837 as the central offices of the I & M Canal Commissioners, the canal authority. This structure was expanded in 1876 when a Victorian-style addition was built to house the home of the canal superintendent. As a result of the Will County Historical Society's efforts to restore the building and establish a museum there, the

September, 1990 • page 2

canal superintendent's family, including children's toys and an 1846 Elias Howe sewing machine.

Also available for visiting will be the Old Congregational Church/Gladys Fox Museum, a short walk from the I & M Canal Museum. The dolomite limestone church, built in 1840 and one of the oldest masonry churches in the state, was constructed on land donated by the Canal Commissioners in response to increased settlement and an interest in having a place of worship. Its original Greek Revival front with wooden portico and steeple was severely damaged in 1888, after which the portico and steeple were removed and replaced by its present Gothic Revival front. In 1955 the property was given to the Lockport Township

wildflowers, limestone bluffs, ash and cottonwood trees, heron, deer and other wildlife-as well as glimpse part of the canal. And of course, no visit to Lockport would be complete without a look at the I & M Canal and its nearest lock, Lock I, the first of 15 such locks on the canal, built around 1845 with locally quarried limestone, whose walls still stand today.

At a time when many Chicagoans are speculating about the potential effects on the area if a new regional airport is built, and others argue about the present environmental effects caused by modem-day transportation and development, a visit to Lockport's past seems timely. Join the Society for a day of discovery and reflection!

A Tale of Hyde Park Park Art

by Alta Blakely

On evening walks my husband and I often stroll through Nichols Park (between 55th and 54th Streets, Kenwood and Kimbark). My curiosity became whetted by the names on the low curved wall just north of 55th Street: Josiah Willard Gibbs, Robert VanGoor, William Bela Hof_man, Lazar M. Perryman, H y Schneiderman. What did these five men have in common?

"Josiah Willard Gibbs was a well known physicist!" said my husband. And I had a hunch that Robert VanGoor might have been the husband of Wanda VanGoor, whom I remembered as a member of the staff at the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Confer ence, probably in the 1950's. But what of the other three?

Then one June evening, as we walked through the park again, suddenly there was a lovely fountain in a crescent-shaped pool behind the wall bearing those names-a fountain of graceful coils from which water arced in all directions. Here was really a surprise and a mystery! I turned to Len Despres, who seems to know the answers to most of my questions about Hyde Park.

"Call Miriam (Mrs. Alex) Elson," Len said. "She and Muriel Beadle were co-chairmen of a sculpture committee back in the '60's, a subcommittee of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference. She is the person to answer your questions."

"Yes," said Miriam Elson, "and Muriel Beadle said we should deposit all our committee minutes in Regenstein Library." A trip to Special Collections at Regenstein then revealed much of the story.

In the early 1960's, as part of Urban Renewal, certain areas were set aside for parks. Community members were interested in making these parks attractive, and the HPKCC Sculpture Committee was set up. Members other than Miriam Elson and Muriel Beadle were Don Baum of the Hyde Park Art Center, Theodora (Mrs. George) Bobrinskoy,

Charles ("Carl") Dornbusch, architect, Barbara Fiske, John Hawkinson of the University of Chicago faculty, Nancy Hays, Natalie (Mrs. Ben) Heineman, Michael Igoe, Jr., Helen (Mrs. Robert) McDougal, Calvin Sawyier, and Joshua Taylor, professor of art history at the University of Chicago.

The Park District responded enthusiasti cally to the willingness of community residents to particpate in the plans for the two parks. Consequently, an announcement of the sculpture design competition went out on November 16, 1964:

"The Park Sculpture Committee of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference invites students of the Art Institute of Chicago to participate in a design competition intended to encourage fresh and unstereotyped thinking about a problem common to urban neighborhoods all over the U.S.: How can small city parks acquire sculpture that the community served by the park can afford, will enjoy, and will be sufficiently proud of to protect and maintain?"

The committee expressed the hope that the sculpture, though artistically satisfying, would not be "Hands off." Also "it should be designed so that some or all of it could be constructed by amateurs, under the direction of the sculptor." (This aspect of the plan proved to be not feasible.)

Photo by Alta Blakely

An impressive panel of judges was assembled: Harry Bouras and Cosmo Campoli, sculptors; Joseph Shapiro, "the well known art collector"; Joshua Taylor, professor of art at the University of Chicago; and Charles ("Carl") Dornbusch, architect and also planner of Harper Court.

A news release from the HPKCC to the Hyde Park Herald on August 10, 1966, stated:

"Over 50 models meeting (the stated) requirements were submitted. Prizes of

$200 each were awarded in June 1965 to three students whose models were adjudged best by a five-man jury of sculptors and art experts. The Chicago Park District, whose officials have worked closely with the Park Sculpture Commit tee from the inception of the project, dis played the models forseveral months at Park District headquarters. (Also at McCormick Place, as part of the

CPD annual flower fair, according to Miriam Elson.)

"The first of the sculptures to be comrnis sioned is an organic form of plastic applied to a steel-wire frame. It is now being made in his studio by the young sculptor, Jerome Scuba, and will be installed in the new neighborhood park at 54th and Blackstone sometime this fall.

continued on next page

September, 1990- page 3

Art• continued

"The other two sculptures are intended fOI the larger park bounded by 54th and 55th Streets, Kimbark and Kenwood Avenues. One, of polished cast stone, by Yvonne Hobbs, will surmount a mound at the north end of the park; the other, a fountain by Gary Wojcik, is to be situated near 55th Street. Both student sculptors are now preparing final designs and speci fications.

" 'If these sculptures meet the special needs of city parks as well as we all believe they will, our project will set a national precedent,' said Edward H. Palmer, executive director of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference.

"He reminded possible donors that

contributions of $100 or more may be specified as memorials, and names of those memorialized will appear at the sculpture site. The Conference itself has authorized expenditure for this purpose of a fund of several hundred dollars sub scribed some years ago by friends of Winifred Moulton, a child who lost her life at an urban renewal site."

The death of Winifred Moulton was ironic and seems to have saddened the whole community. As a part of Urban Renewal, two park areas were set aside on Woodlawn Avenue, one on the east side of the street just north of 53rd Street and one on the west side of the street between 53rd and 54th Streets. Our informants do not all agree as to which park was the one where Winifred died.

Melissa Newman, former HPKCC director, who was "best friend" at the time of Winifred's older sister Ellen, is quite sure it was the presently-named Elm Park, north of 53rd Street.

"While Winnie was playing there," said Winnie Benade, "a dead tree decided to fall." No one had touched it. But Winifred was killed.

Since it was the sculpture in the Blackstone and 54th Street playlot park that was meant for children who wanted to climb, that was the sculpture designated as a children's memorial. Three names now surround the construction: Winifred Moulton, Cynthia Fiske, and Scot Abrams. (The ceramic tiles on which the names are incised were designed by Donald Waddell.)

September, 1990 - page 4

The daughter of Donald and Barbara Fiske, Cynthia had died in 1950 at the age of seven after a year's illness with leukemia.

We have been told that Scot Abrams died in a swimming accident, but we do not know when nor how. Further details are solicited from our readers.

The Scuba sculpture was dedicated on May 26, 1967. Muriel Beadle presided, Miriam Elson and a representative from the Park District spoke, and the Kenwood High School Mixed Chorus sang, according to a Hyde Park Herald article from the HPKCC files. Jerome Scuba was called "a local Hyde Park resident."

Photo by Alta Blakely

As to the men memorialized in the now named Nichols Park, our information is also somewhat incomplete.

H y Schneiderman (three of the

tiles-which were made by Albert Schlick-are missing) proved to be Harry, the husband of Bea Schneiderman.

"Harry had died in January of 1964," said Mrs. Schneiderman. "I read the story in the Herald about the memorials, so I responded. Harry was the head of an ad agency that bore his name."

William Bela Hoffman (one f tile is missing) died in a plane accident over Lake Michigan, said Miriam Elson, "and later his wife, Rena, was killed by lightning in a park in the Rocky Mountains."

No further information has been discovered about Robert VanGoor, except that he and his wife, Wanda, lived (probably arning the '50's) in a court building on Blackstone just north of 55th Street.

The Columbia Encyclopedia says that Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was professor of mathematical physics at Yale from 1871 to 1903. It continues:

"His great contributions to physical

chemistry and thermodynamics have had a profound effect on industry, notable in the production of ammonia. In mathematics he wrote on quatermoins and was influen tial in developing vector analysis. His work in statistical mechanics was espe cially important. Gibbs also contributed to crystallography, the determination of planetary and comet orbits, and electro magnetic theory ... Gibbs was also inter ested in the practical side of science; ... and he received a patent (1866) for an improved type of railroad brake."

Dr. Gibbs was an ancestor of either Edward

H. Palmer or of his wife. Edward ("Ted") Palmer, who was executive director of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference at the time of the sculpture project, provided the memorial for Josiah Willard Gibbs.

Of the fifth man, Lazar M. Perryman, unfortunately, we have discovered no information, but such is solicited from our readers. Oak Woods Cemetery has no record of his death or burial, says Sue Skyles of the Oak Woods staff.

continued on next page

continued from page 4

The fountain was installed in 1968.

The third sculpture, a twenty-foot high abstract piece by Yvonne Hobbs for the northern end of the park between Kimbark and Kenwood, could not be constructed, said Barbara Fiske. "We found out that, in the case of large pieces, sculptors create just the

models. This piece, planned to be cast in steel, would have cost us several hundred thousand dollars to construct."

The Woods Charitable Fund had granted

$10,000 to the Park Sculpture Committee, and

$5000 had been raised among local citizens. Because the funds designated for the Hobbs sculpture had not been used, the committee turned to Cosmo Campoli, an internationally known Hyde Park sculptor. Community parks had no Campoli works, and it was more than appropriate that they should.

Campoli had completed his "Bird of Peace" in 1962. "Except for his kindness, we never could have afforded to buy it," said Fiske.

Margaret Gruen, an eighth-grade student at St. Thomas Elementary School, photographed the Campoli "egg" for her 1990 Chicago

Metro Fair project, "Hyde Park: A History in Sculpture." Her project was among those exhibited at the Hyde Park Historical Society in the late spring. Margaret wrote:

"Cosmo Campoli's 'Bird of Peace' is probably one of Hyde Park's best known sculptures. Completed in 1962, this bird like form has rested in Nichols park between 54th Street and Kimbark Avenue since 1970<Dand has been enjoyed by generations of neighborhood children.

This five-foot bronze bird has the body of an egg with a beak and two legs that hold two more eggs. Campoli calls the sculp ture the bird of peace because he believes that the bird is the most peaceful thing there is; especially a bird settling her eggs around her. The rough stone base of the statue resembles a nest. Campoli says that he has many memories of seeing chicks hatch and be thinks that 'the egg is the most exquisite shape there is. You hold one in your hand and you are holding the whole universe.' "(2)

The Campoli bird-or egg, as it is usually referred to-had been purchased with the understanding that its upkeep was to be the responsibility of the Park District. However, when it was twice vandalized (once knocked off its base, the second time also badly scratched), the Park District washed its hands of the problem.

Photos by Alta Blakely

continued on next page September, 1990 - page 5

continued from page 5

When the other sculptures had been installed in the two parks, the Sculpture Committee had set aside an account of money for their upkeep and necessary repair. (The climb-on-able sculpture in Spruce Park has twice had recoating and repair.) Much of that money had to go for repairing the damage to the Campoli egg, said Margaret Matchett, of the HPKCC. "It is now anchored with long steel rods."

We return to the mystery of the sudden appearance in June of the fountain along 55th Street. The Sculpture Committee had originally requested "a fountain design that would be beautiful in the winter as well as the summer." However, "the policy of the Chicago Park District," said Stephanie Franklin, president of the Nichols Park Advisory Council, "is to put things away for the winter." But when that first spring came, the fountain was not put back. No one seems to have thought to ask where it was. Then it was evidently forgotten. When the recently established Nichols Park Advisory Council made inquiries, it seemed that it had been lost. But finally Elmo Mitchell, Park District operational supervisor, in charge of the gounds at Nichols Park, was able to locate it in storage, and it was returned to its place.

Many Hyde Parkers have exclaimed in delighted surprise at its sudden appearance and its graceful beauty.

(Anyone with more information on these memorials is asked to contact Alta Blakely, 5418 S. Blackstone, phone 684-2784.)

©The dedication ceremony was either May 27 or June 3, 1970.

Q) James L. Reidy, Chicago Sculpture (University of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 266.

Editor's Note: Perhaps local citizens and/or organizations would like to contribute toward needed sculpture repairs. Three of the hand-fired tiles are missing from the fountain wall and others are chipped. The Spruce Park sculpture is in rather urgent need of attention. Contact persons-Stephanie Franklin, 5453 Kenwood, phone 955-3622, pres., Nichols Park Advisory Council; and Norah Erickson, 1420 E. 54th St., treasurer, Spruce Park Advisory Council. Specify "For memorial repair."

September, 1990 - page 6

What About Your History?

By Jessica Young

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. William

J. Powell, who lives at 26th and Indiana Avenue (in what used to be a Jewish neigh borhood at the end of the nineteenth century) when we judged the Kenwood Academy History Fair last year. Mr. Powell's conversa tion was every bit as interesting as the projects we were reading and some of the things he said surprised me-even though perhaps they shouldn't have.

William Powell was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1910 and he moved with his family to Chicago in 1914. At that time Black families were moving to the formerly Jewish area of Grand Boulevard, and the Powell family lived on 32nd and State. Mr. Powell dropped out of school to go to work at the Post Office at the age of sixteen. In those days, if you were under seventeen you had to go to "continuation school" one day a week if you were working eight hours a day. "Continuation school" was required by the child-labor laws.

Mr. Powell remained with the Post Office for the next fifty-six years. During those years he delivered mail in Hyde Park and got to know our neighborhood very well.

One of the stops on this route was the

,elegant Shoreland Hotel, one of fifty-seven(!) hotels in the neighborhood. Mr. Powell told me that the Shoreland, built at the beginning of the 1920's (the same time that K.A.M. and Isaiah Israel congregations were building their temples and moving into the neighborhood) served "gentiles only." (Of course, Black gentiles need not apply either.)

Once, when Mr. Powell went to put the mail in the boxes, a tenant came down to speak with him. "My name's Katz," he said, "But the name on my box says 'McFarland.' Won't you please be sure that I get my mail?" Of course Mr. Powell agreed. And this was only the first of several times that Jewish tenants came and asked him to put their mail in boxes with non-Jewish sounding names.

These folks were not trying to assimilate, exactly, but they were trying to get around the system, if not actually subvert it. And Mr.

Powell was helping.

Now the question arises: Who was Mr. McFarland? Was he a made-up name? A friend of Mr. Katz who was letting his name be used to get around the Shoreland's policy? The former tenant who never took his name off the box?

And there are more questions still. When did the Shoreland change it's policy? What other kinds of anti-semitism did the Jews of Hyde Park experience?

If you have the answers, we want to talk to you at the Hyde Park Historical Society. The Hyde Park Historjcal Society is a multi-age, multi-ethnic group of Hyde Parkers with an interest in learning about, and teaching about, our history. We have an ongoing program of oral history (you can be the talker, or the listener), photographic and archival exhibits in our headquarters at 5529 S. Lake Park Avenue, monthly programs, house tours and lots more. Last year, The Year of Hyde Park," we celebrated the centennial of Hyde Park's annexation to the city of Chicago, This year our ongoing programs will be outdoors and indoors, formal and informal, full of informa tion, friendly and fun.

Maybe we weren't all here in 1889, but some of us have made a real difference in Hyde Park, often times and in ways that are not well known. Take the opportunity to share your story, or your archives, or your skills, with your neighbors. You will have fun, and you will leave a valuable gift to future Hyde Parkers.

You can find out more about the Hyde Park Historia1 Society by coming to Society Headquarters on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 to 4 pm, or by writing to the Society or contacting one of its members.

September, 1990- page 7

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COMING EVENTS

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ltlt®rr

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

April, 1991

Shaking the F mily Tree

by Carol Bradford

It all started, as these things often do, at a funeral, with people wondering why the family only gets together when someone dies.

For our family, it was at the funeral of my father-in-law, Jesse Bradford, Sr., in July, 1988. And so the first Bradford reunion was held in Springfield, Illinois, in July, 1989.

Being only an in-law and expecting to meet many relatives who were previously unknown to me, I brought along notebook and pen for recording the family genealogy. It started with the "eldest child of the eldest child," who gave me all the names and dates she could remem ber. As the afternoon progressed everyone got into the spirit of the thing and children were corning to me asking if their names were in the notebook. One 12 year-old boy showed himself to be the record keeper for the next generation, for he knew the full name and birth date of every one in his family.

It wasn't until the second reunion, in July, 1990, that I began to think about searching back for prior generations. Present at that gathering were two of the three surviving offspring of George and Amelia (King) Bradford, the parents of my father-in-law. This aunt and uncle were able to give the names of some of their parents' siblings and additional birth dates. Armed with this information, I began my search at the local office of the National Archives. I found that searching the census records takes mostly time and patience, and sometimes a little luck comes in to enable you to find more than you had expected.

The Chicago Regional Office of the National Archives is located near Ford City Shopping Center at 7358 South Pulaski. Be sure to call ahead (phone 581-7816) to reserve a space at a microfilm machine, as viewing is by appointment only. It is helpful to take a few 1ninutes on arrival at the viewing room to familiarize yourself with its organization and

the operation of the equipment. I found the staff very willing to assist me in getting started and to answer questions.

The viewing room is lined with cabinets containing the thousands of rolls of ce,nsus information in microfilm. In the center of the room are several rows of microfilm machines, about 30 in all. There are also machines to copy onto print the microfilm records. The most recent indexed census is 1910. But it is only complete for about half the states. The 1900 census is indexed for all states and contains the most complete information, including month and year of birth for each person listed, and relationship to head of household. The 1890 census was almost completely destroyed by fue, The index system for 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910 is called "Soundex" and is organized on a numerical code based on the sound of consonants in the name. One must know only the state of residence and name of head of the household. The Soundex listing then tells in which county, Enumeration District, sheet, and line on which the household is listed in the actual census records. Notebooks give the number of the roll of microfilm for each county.

There are books of printed indexes for some

of the states and censuses not on the Soundex system. There are also several volumes of indexes of names on immigration records, indicating sources such as passenger lists and other records dating to the earliest years of colonial settlement.

With the use of Soundex, I quickly found the George Bradford household listing for both 1910 and 1900. It was on the latter list that I got a bit of luck to help me along. Next to the George Bradford listing on the county censµs, was the name of Anderson King, and his wife, America. We had no names for any siblings of Amelia King Bradford, but since these two

were adjacent on a geographical list, I guessed that Andserson might be Amelia's brother.

From there, I went to the Soundex for 1880.

With the names of George•s siblings that I already knew, including one sister with an unusual name, it took just time and patience to search the list of all the Bradfords in Missis sippi to find the household of Stephen and Hannah Bradford. It included enough of the children we already knew to give positive assurance that these were indeed the ancestors I was seeking.

Then I went to the Soundex for the name King and very quickly found the family of Anderson King, Sr., with his wife, Ellen , and children Fannie, Anderson, Amelia, and Amanda. The dates for Amelia's birth coincided with those we already knew and provided a cross-check to assure that this was the right family.

So now, I had traced this African-American family back to the generation born before emancipation. They appear by name for the

Continued on page 5

1991 Cornell Award Winners

by Mary C. Lewis

A multifaceted range of commendations - embracing the arts, recreation, business development, and architecture - was featured when the Hyde Park Historical Society announced its latest winners of the Paul Cornell Award at the society's annual meeting in February. Five awards were presented for outstanding individual achievement related to restoration in Hytle Park.

The recipients• varied accomplishments reflect the neighborhood's continuing vitality. Thanks to Nancy Campbell Hays' efforts, Hyde Parkers can enjoy the benefits of her many photographs and her tireless voice on behalf of open parkland. Another favorite pastime of many, eating out, was the focus of two other winners, Walter Arnold and Hans Morsbach. Their design and use of sculptured stone reliefs which now grace the entrance facade of the relocated Medici Restaurant on 57th Street makes this location a whimsical combination of the past and present.

Since business development has skyrock

eted, the issue of how to preserve Hyde Park's unique historical flavor has deserved our attention. Balancing business development while projecting an image of graceful, scrupulous restoration requires leadership of a special sort and award winner Timothy Goodsell, president of Hyde Park Bank was duly recognized for tackling the challenge. His efforts resulted in the removal of projected signage and careful restoration of the street level facade at 53rd and Lake Park Avenue.

Hyde Park's bounty of fascinating resi

dences was also represented. The award winning couple, Kitty and Jim Mann, and the restoration of their 1800's shingle style house on Harper Avenue provides a model approach: lovingly preserved exteriors, a well-blended expansion, and distinctive interior designs. All in all, the awards committee spotlighted the best of Hyde Park!

Apri 1991 - page 2

Kitty and Jim Mann

Photos by Alta Blakely

Walter Arnold

The HPHS Annual Meeting

by Margo Criscuola

The Annual Meeting, held February 9, at the Quadrangle Club, was, as John McDermott, Master of Ceremonies, stated, a "celebration of what we love about a special community, rich in history, rich in people, rich in problems," and even having "its own foreign policy." More than 120 members gathered to greet old and new friends, and discuss the past and recent events over a wine bar and a festive dinner - no small part of the mission of the Historical Society.

Then for the business of the evening. Zeus Preckwinkle, outgoing president, recounted with some pride the full schedule of exhibits and talks which enriched the past year, and thanked the members who made possible our increased contribution to the community. He especially thanked Anne Stevens for her taste, skill, and hard work in organizing the meeting.

Zeus also announced the winners of our contest to identify some of Nancy Campbell Hays' photos of changing Hyde Park: Alta Blakely and Norah and Bill Erickson. Norah explained her accomplishment modestly -

"it's just living here all those years." Perhaps a lively interest in the community played a part, too.

Bert Benade, chair of the nominating committee, then led us through an exercise in "guided democracy" that resulted in the election of a slate of officers and board members for next year, with Carol Bradford as president, and new members Julius Williams and Kevin Shalla.

Our past reviewed and our future secured, it was time to make the annual Paul Cornell awards. The Awards Committee, composed of Ed Campbell, chair, with Alta Blakely and Devereux Bowly, named the following recipients:

Nancy Campbell Hays, perennial photogra pher of the Hyde Park scene and zealous advocate for the preservation of community parks.

Tim Goodsell, President of Hyde Park Bank, for the scrupulous restoration of the street level facade of the Bank building, 1525 East 53rd Street.

Kitty and Jim Mann, whose restoration of

their 1880's residence on Harper Avenue faithfully preserves the original Shingle Style in a subtle expansion, while creating interiors of eclectic distinction.

Hans Morsbach and Walter Arnold, for the relocation of the Medici Restaurant on 57th Street behind a "delightful entrance facade of whimsical historicism," which "juxtaposes the Medieval and the Modem with comeliness and wit." Morsbach and Arnold recognized the contractor Bruce Johnstone for his role in the success of the project; and Arnold recounted what a pleasure it was to "give a few gargoyles back to Hyde Park," thanking the Eriksons for the prize he won years ago as an art student in the neighborhood.

Ed Campbell accompanied the awards with slides showing the awardees' accomplish ments.

The grand finale of the evening was "Milestones and Monuments," a photo essay on Hyde Park history, by Ed Campbell. This slide presentation was originally designed as an introduction to Hyde Park, but so thorough was it in exploring all the aspects of the neighbor hood, social, historical, and architectural, that even dedicated long-term society members found they learned something new, as well as enjoying memorable views of fatniliar sights.

And now, Happy New Year, Historical Society!

Stone Carving by Walter Arnold

Apri 1991 - page 3

Photos by Margaret Gruen

Hyde Park: A History in Sculpture

An Excerpt From the Prize Winning History Fair Project

by Margaret Gruen, March 1990 St. Thomas the Apostle School

FamousMen

Famous people are one of the most common subjects for sculpture. Hyde Park contains relatively few, and the ones that it has are all figures of men (no women) in history. The sculptures of famous men in Hyde Park tend to be placed away from the center of Hyde Park. Two are on the Midway and the other two are even further. Two of the four men in the sculptures are known for their intellectual accomplishments.

Several of the sculptures in Hyde Park commemorate famous people in history or in the neighborhood's development. The fountain in Drexel Square in the oldest of Hyde Park's sculptures. It was erected in 1882 by Henry Manger in honor of Francis Martin Drexel, who, although he never set foot in Chicago, owned all of the land between 47th and 51st Streets. He gave some of his land to the city to be used as a road, on the condition that the boulevard bear his name. After his death, his two sons wrote to the city and commissioned a

statue to be built in remembrance of their father. Drexel stands proudly above the fountain, looking at all the land that he once owned.

The 40-foot tall Thomas Garrigue Masaryk Memorial stands at the far east end of the Midway directly opposite Lorado Taft's "Fountain of Time." Designed by Albin Polasek, this sculpture was cast in 1949 and dedicated on May 29, 1955. The sculpture is of Saint Wenceslaus who, as the legend goes, led a band of knights who slept under Blanik mountains in the center of Bohemia waiting for the opportunity to deliver their people from oppression. Thomas Garriguc Masaryk (1850.. 1937) was Czechoslovakia's first president,

and the sculpture is there to symbolize his ideas of freedom, democracy, and humanity. The location of this sculpture so close to the University is fitting as Garrigue worked on the faculty there in 1902.

A secluded statue of Gotthold Ephraim

Lessing stands in Washington Park. It is a full sized bronze portrait of the German playwright, critic, and philosopher who is considered to be the father of modem German literature. The statue, by Albin Polsek, was completed in 1930 and faces the west so that it can receive most of a day's sunlight. The statue was funded by Henry L. Frank, who received a large inherit ance from his uncle Michael Reese and erected a hospital bearing his name.

A large statue of Carl von Linnaeus or Carl von Linne stands on the Midway directly in front of Harper Library. Carolus Linne was a Swedish botanist who devised the system for the scientific classification of plants and animals. The statue had originally stood in Fullerton Place but was reerected on the Midway and dedicated on April 19, 1976. For the Swedish-Americans in the city, the day was a holiday. The Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf came to rededicate and unveil the statue by Johan Dyfverrnan.

Apri 1991 - page 4

Correspondence

To The Hyde Park Historical Society:

Family Tree - conL from page I

first time in the 1870 census, the first in which all persons were listed equitably as "free inhabitants." Prior to that census, there was a supplemental listing of slaves, by state and name of owner. No names were given for slaves, only age and sex.

A word of advice to anyone undertaking a search in the census: these old records are written by hand, some more legibly than others. There is great variance in spelling of names, so one must be alert to s,earch for closely related names. For example, Amelia King was listed variously as "Melia" and "Cornelia".

Your search will be easier if it involves ancestors in rural or sparsely populated areas. It was not so time-consuming for me to go through a geographical list for a rural county when it was not indexed. Anyone searching in Cook County, Illinois, however, might be deterred without an index. Once again, luck was with me.

And a word of caution: genealogy is un ending. The more you know, the more you want to know, so you may get hooked! Maybe I'll see you at the archives some day!

I read.frequently about the Robie House, Frank Lloyd Wright's classic prairie house, in various publications, and I am always reminded of the Wilbers who used to live there. We lived at 5748 Kimbark, next door to the Miehe/sons (he was the first, I believe, American winner of the Nobel Prize in physics). Behind our houses was an alley and the other side of the alley was the brick wall surrounding the back yard of the Robie House at 58th and Woodlawn. When I was given a tennis racket at the age of eight I started practicing by hitting balls in the alley against the wall as a backboard. At the time Mr. and Mrs. Wilber were living there. The Stevens boys (whose father later built Stevens Hotel) who lived around the corner on 58th street were my companions at the time, and we would often go into the Wilber 's yard and climb on the walls and porches. Mrs. Wilber was kind enough to invite us in occasionally and give us cookies in the kitchen. A very charming, generous lady. To us children, Mr. Wilber was aforbidding,fierce-looking man we seldom saw and to whom we never spoke.

About ten years later, early in the depres sion, I heard that they had moved out of the Robie House and I did not see or hear of them until the summer of 1934. I was a student at the University and a park ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park that summer and several summers thereafter. Mr. and Mrs.

Wilber drove into the Aspenglen Campground at the park where I lived alone in a little cabin and took care of the campground. I was 19.

They were pulling a house trailer behind their car, and they settled into one of the campsites and stayed all summer. As was true of many at

that time, their financial circumstances had changed. They were both very proud people and never once complained about it. When they recognized me and we had several visits, I got to know them well. Mr. Wilber was ill with asthma and very weak. Mrs. Wilber was as active as ever. He was resentful of his illness as something which detracted from his dignity. I helped them a lot because in those days the campgrounds had no electricity and only a few faucet outlets for running water. This being a depression year, there were many who came to the campground in June and stayed until Labor Day. The Wilbers left in September and said they were going to Arizona. They left me with many pleasant memories of our conversations and of earlier days in Chicago. I never saw them again. Seeing Robie House when I visit Hyde Park brings all this back to me, and I am glad that it is now in the good hands of the University Alumni Association.

Sam Hair

1522 Stanford Pl.

Charlotte, NC 28207

Ed.Note

We thank Mr. Hair for writing. How his boyhood memories bring to life the bricks and morter of Robie House! We are always delighted to hear from you, dear readers. Please write and share your memories with us.

Apri 1991 - page 5

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!* Fifteen Schools Mark !*

! GOINGS - ON: !

! HPHS Fifteenth !

*: Anniversary !*

What's Past for Hyde Park is Prologue !

** * **

A Memoir by **

! To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of its *

** Leon Despres *

founding, the Society sent to the fifteen schools !

* in the Hyde Park community copies of two books *

dear to the heart of Hyde Park citizens:

5th Ward Alderman, 1955 to 1975 *

* Sunday, April 14, 1991, 2-4 p.m. *

McGiffertHall, 5751 South Woodlawn

** Hyde Park Houses, that wonderful collection *

* and *

of photos and information about the present *

! community as well as a concise and quite

** Hyde Park's Harvard Connection: **

* thorough history of the past, by the late Jean !

!* Harvard School - 125 Years of Excellence *

* Block, historian and founding member of the *

* with Zeus Preckwinkle & Julius Williams !

* Society.

and

* Sunday,April21,1991,2-4p.m. *

* Harvard School, 4731 South Ellis *

*; The Chicago World's Fair of 1893, A ;

** and looking ahead... **

Photographic Record, a collection of photos *

* and descriptions of that great event. *

* We hope these books will encourage our local *

* young scholars to continue their study of our *

community history.

!* A Tour of Hyde Park Sculpture with !*

* Margaret Gruen, History Fair Prize Winner,

* in early summer - see page 4 *

* * ** **

******************************** ********************************

HYDE PARK

HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Ncew Ilce\1\1cerr

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

July, 1991

Eighty Years Around Hyde Park - What's Past Is Prolqgue

Excerpts from a talk by Leon M. Despres

before the Hyde Park Historical Society on April 14, 1991 Part One:

... Well, you asked me to talk about Hyde Park in the last eighty years, and it happens that this month, April, is exactly the 80th anniversary of my arrival in Hyde Park, of my first visit to Hyde Park. My family lived at 4127 Michigan Avenue, and they rented the first apartment at 5488 Everett Avenue. I remember coming one Sunday in April to see it and I was very depressed because the work hadn't been finished in the apartment. They took me to the room that they said would be the room I would occupy, and there were sawhorses in there and lumber. I did not see how I could play or sleep in such disarray. That was my first visit to Hyde Park. It was April 1911 and this is April 1991 so I can truthfully talk about my eighty years in Hyde Park.

Hyde Park started as a residential area in 1856 and is now 135 years old. I've

lived here 80 years. I have lived through

59% of the total life of Hyde Park.

Hyde Park has been a wonderful community to live in. I feel privileged and fortunate that my family decided to rent the apartment at 5488 Everett. Hyde Park is a community with exceptional vitality, exceptional creativity, independence, a strong sense of identity, and a remarkable agglomeration of shared values. It's a community that has been able to respond to crises over the years, and could do so again. At the moment there isn't a visible

crisis in Hyde Park but there will be and Hyde Park will respond to the crisis again. I think there are two stable continuing factors in Hyde Park that you have to think about. There's the enormous value of Hyde Park's geography and the presence of the University of Chicago.

The University's presence provides a continuing group of people who are attracted here because of the University. They work there, they teach there, they study there, or they just come to the community because the University is there and it provides a leavening and interest and support that's extremely valuable to the community. Those two factors have continued during all eighty years.

There have been a lot of changes. Some of them are changes that have occurred in other communities as well. They're not peculiar to Hyde Park, but they have influenced Hyde Park, while some changes are peculiar to Hyde Park.

Let's talk about the geography. When I moved here at the age of three, Everett Avenue was the easternmost street, and there was nothing, no structure except a small shanty, between the apartments on the west side of Everett Avenue and Lake Michigan. In the morning when I looked out through the sun porch windows, I could see the sun rising over the lake. I remember and I see it still overlooking the lake, but now on Stony Island Avenue

from the tenth floor of Vista Homes. There were lots of empty lots in Hyde Park then, and across the street from 5488 Everett in the empty lot was a small shanty occupied by an old fisherman, Captain Petersen. He and his family lived there. He fished. There was still commer cial whitefish-fishing in Lake Michigan, and in the winter he would have his commercial fisherman friends pull their boats up and park them in that empty lot.

There were houses and apartments in Hyde Park, but until the 1920's I can't remember any high rise apartments (except the late famous Beatrice and Harcourt apartments at 57th and Dorchester). The first one that I remember is 5490 South Shore Drive which was built about 1920. It was very exciting to see this luxury, high rise apartment building being built. At about the same time, two hotels were built, the Cooper Carlton and the Sisson, now called the Del Prado and the Hampshire House. As the years went on, the topography of Hyde Park changed because many high rises were built. I think they have affected the community in a number of ways. To some extent they have crowded the community, but to some extent they also provide congenial and pleasant places to live. And to the extent that they're cooperatives and condomini ums, they have created a stable ownership too.

Continued on page 2

The empty lots used to be good places to play, but they are all gone. In a small way they were replaced during urban renewal by the creation of valuable open spaces. And there was always Jackson Park. The Park is a continuing asset, but it has been greatly diminished since my childhood. It's been diminished by the construction of motorized highways through the Park, along the lake front. In my childhood, occasionally you would be taken for a drive along the lake front just to have a spin along the lake. I can't imagine people driving now just for the fun of the drive along the lake, but it happened then. There was horseback riding which is gone, there were row boats you could use, outstanding ice-skating, and the Midway too. There was a refec tory in the German Building, a castle on the Rhine left over from the World's Fair. That's gone. There was a stunning rose garden south of the three Japanese temple buildings. They are gone. There were replicas of Columbus's boats in the lagoon. And of course there was lots more

green space and lots less parking. Hyde Park has responded by creating the Jackson Park Council, by defending the parks, and by supporting Friends of the Parks. But it is a continuing problem. I think back with regret and nostalgia about the diminution of Jackson Park over the years.

In my childhood, horses were very important. A great change that has come over Hyde Park has been caused by the automobile. In the 1912-1913 school year, I attended kindergarten in the Chicago Beach Hotel, a three story, gracious building on Hyde Park Boulevard between Hyde Park (then East End Avenue) and Cornell. Every morning Mr. Brown drove his carriage to pick me up. He picked up five or six other children and drove us to the Chicago Beach Hotel. For many years, at least until I was 17 or 18, when people got off the J.C. at 53rd street in the evenings there was a coachman who solicited rides to drive people home.

July, 1991 -pag 2

That's the last carriage I remember in Hyde Park. The delivery wagons were nearly all drawn by horses. In the alleys there would always be grocery wagons. Every small grocery had a modest delivery wagon pulled by a horse. Coal was pulled by horses and delivered in the alleys.

There were at least five dairies, whose wagons came through the alleys daily. Ice was delivered by horse and wagon. The icemen came through the alleys with horses pulling the ice wagons and people would have signs out to show whether they wanted 25 or 50 or 75 or 100 pounds. And the iceman would chip the ice from the blocks, swing it over the pad on his left shoulder, and carry it upstairs. Then sometimes we would get on the wagon's back step and take a small piece of ice to suck on. The horse has disappeared, the personal street cleaners have disappeared, and the sparrow population has dimin ished.

Those are changes which I suppose are common to all communities, but they've radically changed the appearance and the face of Hyde Park. The alleys were lively places. We used to play in the alleys. They were filled with people coming through them all the time. Except for the coldest winter weather, peddlers of all sorts came through, men selling fruits and vegetables. They would buy fruits and vegetables at the wholesale market, put them in a basket, carry the basket on their shoulders and go from house to house. They must have produced fresh quality fruits and vegetables, because I know my mother bought from them and she wouldn't have bought from them unless they were good. Knife sharpeners came through ringing their bells. Old clothes buyers came through all the time shouting, "Old clothes to sell, Rags, old iron," and then there were street musicians of all kinds. Organ grinders with monkeys, hurdy-gurdy grinders who would just come and play in the back yards until they got a few coins. There were German bands, bands with two

or three brass instruments who would come through. Singers would come through. The alleys were places of liveliness, all of which has disappeared. It disappeared with the horse and disap peared also with the cheapness of labor.

There really must have been a lot of cheap labor at that time. Many of the street musicians were Italian, recent Italians, recent Germans. The peddlers were recent Italians and Jewish immigrants. There just was plentiful labor working for very low returns. That's why if you bought at a small grocery store there was no problem about delivery because the grocer could easily hire a delivery boy or delivery man for not much money. We had three mail deliveries a day, that's hard to imagine.

The Hyde Park Post Office was at 55th and.Kimbark and the mail men would come out with their bags over their shoulders and take the street car free, as they can now, and you had three deliveries a day. Mail was delivered from downtown by white, enclosed postal street cars.

For general transportation, there were automobiles in my childhood, but the horse was still very important. We relied very heavily on street cars and especially on the Illinois Central. The Illinois Central was the great link between Hyde Park and downtown. It's hard to imagine that there were trains every ten minutes. A ten ride ticket when I began buying it regularly was a dollar ten and the IC was our prized means of transportation. We were thrilled in the 1920's when it was electrified. Until then, Hyde Park's air was filled with cinders from coal furnaces and especially from the stacks of the J.C. locomotives. I haven't had a coal cinder in my eye for 30 years. Going downtown by car was a problem. During the day it took at least forty-five minutes. In my childhood, there was no Outer Drive and a car had to wander along the boulevards. And so our community was more self-contained than now, more solidly oriented toward only the Loop, and very dependent on public transportation. Today, we still have excellent public transportation in the bus

Continued on page 5

On the occasion of the 125th Anniversary of The Harvard School, we are delighted to reprint these reflections on its earliest days by John J. Schobinger, Headmaster for many years. First printed in the school's yearbook, The Review, in 1925, this document will delight Chicago and Hyde Park history enthusiasts.

The Early Days of The Harvard School and My Connection With It

by John J. Schobinger

The history of cities, like that of states, has its epochs, outstanding dates which stand as landmarks from which events are dated. Our country reckons before and since the War of the Revolution; the world at large will for generations count before and since the Great War; Chicago's critical event was the Great Fire in 1871. Before the fire was the old Chicago which we of today can hardly imagine, when Michigan Avenue, as far north as Van Buren, was purely a resident street; when Congress Street was in the midst of a resident section; when Wabash Avenue was the fashionable street where the merchant princes lived. Even when I saw it, after '73, I admired the large, fine trees that shaded it to Twelfth Street, as far south as I walked. There is not one of them left.

The beginnings of the Harvard School reach back into the prehistoric time "before the fire." As far as I have been able to find, it was born in 1865. Its founder was Edward Stanley Waters, of Salem, Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard University, who named it in honor of his Alma Mater. He was a brother of Henry Waters, the foremost genealogist of America, who has done more than any other to establish the English connections of the early settlers and of "The Father of Our Country."

The first location of the school was at Congress Street, between Wabash and Michigan Avenues. It was scarcely established when the great fire came and wiped it out, scattering in every direction the families that had supported it. Mr.

Waters moved it west, to Sheldon Street, where it lived precariously for a year or two, and then to Sixteenth Street on the south side, where I knew it first. There was a row of narrow three-story brick buildings, three of them occupying a 50- foot lot. Mr. Waters had rented two of them, one being used for the school, the other for his living quarters. Three young

John J. Schobinger

bachelor business men shared his housekeeping expenses with him. I happened at the time to be foot-loose, as my engagement as tutor in a family had come to an end. Robert Collyer, a prominent Unitarian clergyman, with whom I had become acquainted, gave me an introduction to Mr. Waters, and it was my good fortune to become engaged by him for a few hours' science teaching for the remaining ten weeks of the school. By the end of that time, we had become well acquainted, and Mr. Waters proposed to me an engagement as a regular teacher for the following year.

Mr. Waters was a scholarly gentleman-I would underline both words-with extensive cultural interests, many more than he could make use of in his school. And the school was very small. There were just 19 boys when I joined it. Only two blocks away, on Eighteenth Street, was Mr. Babcock's School, and about that time Professor Allen, who had up to then been principal of Lake Forest Academy, opened on Twenty-second Street a school which soon became quite

large. I did not realize what this meant, but

I think Mr. Waters did. He, no doubt, found it hard to make both ends meet. In addition to his school work, he gave lectures on Art to a club of ladies on Prairie and Calumet Avenues, whose, husbands were at the time the leading men in the Chicago business world. I need mention but the names of Marshall Field,

P. D. Armour, George Armour, Edson Keith, George Pullman, Sam Allerton, Charles H. Hamill, Wirt Dexter, W. B. Walker, J.M. Walker, John G. Shortall, Albert Sturges, W. G. Hibbard, Fernando Jones and others who are all well known to the older generation of Chicagoans. But the school did not grow. By the end of the year Mr. Waters got weary of the ceaseless struggle and, promising himself better returns from his real love as a dealer in objects of Art, agreed to sell me the school. This was in June, 1876.

I had been principal of a small high school in Switzerland for five years before coming here, and I had learned a good deal about keeping school. Had I known more about American business conditions, I might not have undertaken the venture with the alacrity I did. However, all the boys came back, and in two years, by new additions, the number grew to 35. Not that progress was easy. I gave up one of the two houses, lived on the first floor of the school, gave private lessons, worked night and day, cooked my own breakfast and lunch, and went out for supper. I bought 21 tickets for $5.C)O at a little restaurant that a man by the name of Philip Henrici had opened on State Street, south of Van Buren. His small beginnings prospered as mine have, and Henrici's of today, on Randolph Street, resembles his beginnings on South State Street about as the Harvard School of today resembles the school of 1876. The net income of that first year was just $360.00, so I was, like some illustrious followers in the great war, a dollar-a-day man.

Continued on page 4

July, 1991 - page3

Continued from page 3

The monotony of my daily fare was agreeably broken by the weekly invitation to Sunday breakfast by a kind neighbor, Mrs. Murry Nelson, whose New England codfish balls still stand in grateful remembrance.

In 1878, in anticipation of further increase, I gave up my Sixteenth Street quarters and rented, at a considerably higher rental, the house at 977 Indiana Avenue, later numbered 2101 Indiana Avenue. I found it very much out of repairs, in places that did not show at first sight, and the bills nearly broke me; but when once arranged, it proved very serviceable. The school was housed there until 1897, when the shift of population induced us to find new quarters. In the school year '79-'80, the number of boys reached 62.

In 1880, I formed a partnership with Mr. John C. Grant, a Yale man, who had been the principal assistant of Mr. Allen, of the Allen Academy, at Twenty-second Street. Mr. Grant was a fine, straight forward man, a good scholar, a strong disciplinarian, though with no apparent effort. He was somewhat stem, especially in his earlier years, but perfectly just and hence universally respected, and so absolutely straight and honorable that you might, with perfect safety, have left your

Wabash at Congress Before the Fire

interests in his keeping, even if there were a possibility of conflict with his own.

This perfect partnership lasted for 34

years between two men differing in origin, traditions, education and temperament, until Mr. Grant's death in 1914 dissolved it.

Meanwhile the school was growing. In 1881 we bought the building, in 1883 we enlarged it, added a third story and rearranged it internally, which made it very convenient for our purpose.

In 1890, we erected another building on the rear of the lot, which contained a gymnasium with shower baths below, and a kindergarten and primary department above.

But by the middle of the nineties, we felt that our neighborhood was rapidly changing. Business was encroaching, people were moving away. In 1897, we regretfully abandoned Indiana Avenue and rented a fine building at Forty-seventh Street and Lake Avenue that had been standing vacant for some time. After extensive (and expensive!) alterations, we moved into that beautiful building, and we should have been quite content to stay there, but realized, of course, that it was

July, 1991 - page 4

too expensive to purchase and that it must ultimately go into the market. While there, we absorbed first the Princeton-Yale School, and a little later the Cambridge School, then on Fiftieth and Lake Avenue. The Princeton-Yale School was then owned by Mr. Payson S. Wild, who became a member of our faculty for the next few years. He will address the graduating class at our commencement exercises in June.

But in 1906, the inevitable happened the building occupied by the Harvard School was sold, and we had to move.

There were not many choices open. After much search, we finally secured a lease again, unfortunately, a lease on precarious terms-of the building at 4651 Drexel Boulevard, where the late Forty-seventh Street Hospital now stands. It was limited in size, inadequate in construction, and seemed especially unsafe in case of fire, as it was, like other buildings we had previously occupied, entirely of good construction inside. But public understanding of the needs of better methods of building had grown, so that this building seemed worse than the others.

For that reason, and also because it was plain that in a neighborhood so rapidly building up, such a prominent comer called for a high-grade improvement, we had to come to the conclusion that the only way to secure the future of the school was to house it in a permanent home. In its fifty years of life, it had demonstrated its vitality; many of its fonner students were among the prominent citizens of Chicago, and there seemed to exist no reason why its services to the community should not continue indefinitely.

So, in 1915, after the first fright at the outbreak of the war had somewhat abated, I started the campaign for the organization of a building corporation that would put up a permanent home for the Harvard School. I first addressed myself to the former students of the Harvard School, many of whom are now prominent men of affairs. The response was surprising, the more so because none of these men had any present interest in the school. A special debt of gratitude is due them.

About half the stock subscriptions came from that source. Then I saw present patrons of the school whose sons would, for a time at least, profit from the better

opportunities. The success among them was equally gratifying. By September, 1916, the architect, Mr. Charles H. Prindeville, had his plans completed; the building was begun, and on May 1, 1917, was occupied.

This is the only financial help the Harvard School has ever received, and this was not in the form of a gift, but of a loan, at low interest, to be sure, which is being repaid as fast as the income of the school will allow. There is no truth in the account which a Chicago paper gave last summer that the Harvard School had been founded by some rich men who wanted a school for their boys.

It would be invidious to discriminate between the good friends who have contributed to the success of the enterprise. But I can not close this chapter without naming, with grateful recognition, three men who for years, up to now, have ceaselessly, generously and gratuitously given their time and skill to the actual carrying on of the legal and administrative

business of the building company and the school, which never could have accomplished otherwise what it did. They are Charles H. Hamill, Mr. James E. Greenebaum and Mr. Joseph E. Otis. Nor would it be just to close this account without grateful acknowledgment of the faithful service of a host of teachers who have done most of the work that has placed the Harvard School where it now stands. Mrs. Johnson took our Primary department when it had 30 boys; it now has 130, and a teacher for every grade. Mr. Ford, our second teacher as to seniority, has given his whole strength to the school, ever calling for more work. The faculty has grown from three in 1876 to twenty

t o in 1925.

What has occurred since May 1, 1917, is recent history, known to all. The most important event, I should say, is the association of Mr. Pence as principal with me of the Harvard School. His energy and faithfulness are full of promise for the further prosperity of the school.

Around Hyde Parle - cont. from page 2

lines. The Illinois Central is still good, but greatly diminished, and of course there's tremendous reliance on the Outer Drive and the automobile. I know someone who lives at 5490 South Shore Drive who tells me what a wonderful thing it is that he can get in his car and be in his office in the Prudential Building in twelve minutes.

That is remarkable. But Hyde Park is now tied to many reachable parts of the city, and that's had an enormous effect on Hyde Park shopping and its stores.

In my childhood, 55th street was a linear street of stores from Hyde Park Boulevard to Cottage Grove Avenue. Just a succession of stores without interruption on both sides of the street. The establish ments were more varied and numerous than a busy shopping mall, but the units were small and the shoppers were mostly pedestrians. There were businesses for which there is no longer room - a huge greenhouse (Metz's) off 55th Street on Harper; a dairy off 55th Street at Univer sity that turned raw milk into butter, cream and milk for delivery; candy and ice cream stores that made their product on the premises; grocery stores of all kinds from convenience to gourmet; fine butcher shops; kosher butcher shops; stores with crates of live chickens in front; dry goods stores; soda fountains; aromatic bakeries; luscious delicatessens; well-stocked toy stores; and near Lake Park Avenue, saloons with swinging doors. I remember the 1918 excitement of the first chain store

- an Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company store just west of Blackstone. The A&P has disappeared, but the supermart is here to stay, and the variety of a mile-long linear pedestrian street like 55th is now just nostalgia.

Harvard School on Drexel Boulevard

To be continued in the next issue...

July, 1991 -page 5

May 26, 1991

To: Editor:

Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter

From: Sam Hair

1522 Stanford Place

Charlotte, NC 28207

You may be interested in this letter my mother wrote to my father in 1910...

A letter written by Florence Hair to her husband, September 29, 1910, describing the take-off of Brookins airplane flight from Washington Park, Chicago, to Springfield, Illinois:

1447 E. 52nd St.

Chicago, Ill. Sep. 29 - 1910

Dear Thomas:

While my washing is "on the soak" I'm going to tell you about seeing Brookins start off for Springfield this morning to win if possible the $10,000.00 the Record Herald offers for its aviation prize for the feat. For two days this daring fellow has attracted the most enthusiastic attention from hundreds of thousands who saw his trial flights in Grant Park. It will be interesting to know what estimate the Record Herald will make of the crowds that filled Washington Park this morning in the vicinity of the big meadow there.

Thomas, Lenore & I drove over about 8:50 after taking father to 42nd Street. Every person and vehicle seemed to be headed for the Park and the very air was

vibrant with expectation and awe.

The large meadow was kept clear by policemen, mounted, and a frame of human beings packed solid, a hundred feet

Correspondence

deep, framed the entire open space. At the southwest corner of the meadow we could the frail aircraft. We drove near the

northwest corner of the meadow and got into the large car of Mrs. Houston with an excellent view of the field. Machines were thick everywhere. Finally the huge paddles began to revolve in trial revolu tions and the crowd began to hum like a bit of the machinery itself. Then the engine was started and the dainty ship with its one occupant, strapped and wired in so that he was a very part of it, made a running, lifting motion for an incredibly short distance, then rose directly up over the trees with astonishing grace and beauty. The loud noise the engine made seemed to be apart from that magnificent sight that was the most thrilling I ever saw in all my life. Brookins flew around the meadow about 200 feet high, going directly over our heads, then, slowly mounting higher and higher he sped away in the sunshine like a glistening gold dragonfly.

I can't tell you how affecting it is to see

it, with your own eyes. It is nothing to read about. You must see it. And the tremendous crowds and bands and the glorious sunshine all added to the occa sion. My one thought was to have you see it, too. I was glad little Tom was there, tho' he was engrossed in a door key! Shall we not enter this as "Red Letter Day" in his book? My whole mind is fixed on that aeroplane, speeding over the country this sunny morning. If he isn't afraid, what a marvelous ride for that fellow! It is 185 miles there and everything seemed to be propititious as he flew away. I'm sure that hundreds of thousands were unconsciously praying for his success. I hope we will hear this afternoon.

(Remainder of letter is personal.) (signed) Florence Cummings Hair

Editor's note:

Our special thanks to Mr. Hair. Imagine the thrill his mother must have felt - perhaps akin to what we felt when we watched men landing on the moon! And how beautifully she tells it!

Please send us your memories or your remarkable historical documents or photographs. These precious bits of history love to be shared!

July, 1991 - page 6

Fifteen Years on the Hyde Park Historical Society Board

Carol Brad/ord, cu"ent HPHS president, looks back on our fifteen years:

The first Historical Society meeting I attended was sometime in the winter of 1976-77. It was held at Hitchcock Hall and the program was a lecture on the Hitchcocks and the construction of that campus building. The only person there whom I knew was Ted Anderson, a fellow member of the United Church of Hyde Park, and at the time still owner of the hardware store at Kimbark Plaza. I signed

a sheet being passed around, indicating my interest in joining the society.

A few weeks later, I received a call, perhaps from Muriel Beadle who was

Headquarters - 1980

president at the time, inviting me to join the Board of Directors. I recall being pleasantly surprised at the invitation, as everyone was new to me. My husband and I were relative newcomers to the area, having moved to our home at 51st and Woodlawn in 1971.

My first board meeting that spring was held at Robie House. Besides Ted and Muriel, the board members I recall from that time were Leon Despres, Al and Thelma Dahlberg, Jean Block, Betty Davey, Malcolm Collier, Dev Bowley, Clyde Watkins, and Michael and Cathleen Conzen.

One of the topics of discussion at that first meeting was a plan to produce an historical map of Hyde Park. Everyone was enthusiastic, and the hope was to have the map ready for sale by the next year's art fair. Little did we know what we were in for! Over the years, many of us did research on historic sites. We developed criteria for places to be included on the map. We hired a graduate student to do further research and verify data. Michael Conzen located a cartographer and graphic artist who could do the actual map preparation. Each year we would hope to "have it ready for sale at the next year's art fair." Bus alas! it was not to be. We were not sure enough that all our information was absolutely correct (a requirement emphasized by Jean Block), production complications arose, key people were no longer available to do certain tasks. It became a running joke at board meetings. I think it was some time during the mid '80's that the idea was officially laid to rest. Perhaps in the next century it will be resurrected!

As the Society grew, the Board began

to seek a location for a headquarters. When we agreed upon the present site, Ted Anderson proposed a $100 charter membership drive as a way to raise funds for the necessary renovation. Ted was a natural for such a drive because he was such a persuasive salesman, and he knew almost everyone in Hyde Park who might be a potential donor. With his efforts, and those of others, we raised the $40,000 needed to tum our building from the decrepit eyesore it had been into a handsome structure of which the Society and community could be proud.

The grand opening festivities in October, 1980 included a parade down 53rd Street from the staging area at the Murray Lot over to 5529 South Lake Park. There were bands, cheerleaders, clowns, community organizations, floats, board members in period costumes, and local politicians. The fanfare and hoopla have not been surpassed to this day.

From then on, we met at our own building. But I, for one, had enjoyed the chance to meet in board members' homes. Otherwise, I might never have seen the interior of the Benjamin Marshall house at 49th and Ellis, owned at the time by our treasurer, Gary Husted; or the double house on Harper, owned by Al and Thelma Dahlberg, and Betty Davey's home just up the street. Others I enjoyed were the 50th Street rowhouse of the Conzens; the home of Tom and Georgene Pavalec on Cornell, decorated so festively for Christmas; and the homes of Clyde Watkins (a former president of the Society) and John and Theresa McDermott, both near 48th and Kimbark.

We all shared stories about the trials and

joys of owning an older Hyde Park house.

The publication of Jean Block's book by that title was a source of pride for all of us. Our home didn't make it into the book, but not many months later, Jean called me excitedly. She had been at our home a few times, and reported that in the course of doing some further library research, she had come across a picture of the house in a May, 1914 issue of Inland Architect. It described the owner, one Alfred Lang, an architect who had designed it for his own family. She regretted that she couldn't take the bound volume out of the Center for Research Libraries. Well, we happened to have a fellow church member, Judy Sandstrom, who was a staff member there, and she assisted us in getting our own copies of that page. Jean also encouraged me to write a history of my family's farm in Turner County, South Dakota, which had been settled as a homestead by my great-grandfather, Paul Ysbrand, in 1874.

One of the things I prize about my association with the Society has been the friendships which have developed. Early on, Thelma Dahlberg and I discovered a common bond as natives of South Dakota. Bea Boehm also has relatives there. Betty Borst is a fellow social worker, with whom I've shared common interests. The list could go on and on, of talented, dedicated people who have served the Society over the years.

When I was asked to serve as president, I was a bit daunted when I realized that the other women who have been president were Muriel Beadle and Jean Block. What shoes to fill! I only hope that I can approach the standard they set.

July, 1991 - pagt: 7

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A Book of Special Interest to Hyde Park Readers

Reviewed by Leon Despres

RIGHTEOUS PILGRIM - THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HAROLD L. ICKES,

1874 - 1952; by T. H. Watkins (Henry Holt, 1010 pp)

is an excellent biography of FDR's great Secretary of the Interior. Of special interest are the pages about his eighteen years in Hyde Park from 1893 to 1911.

Ickes came to Chicago from Altoona, Pennsylvania, to live with an uncle in Englewood, where he graduated from Englewood High School. In 1893 he entered the new University of Chicago and lived on campus. Being very poor, he ate one fifteen-cent meal a day in a tiny restaurant near Ellis and 56th, operated by

..Mother Ingram." "Fried ham was my

customary dish," he wrote, "because with the fried ham I could get all the bread and butter I wanted so managed to get along." In 1896 he fell in love with handsome

Anna Wilmarth, the richest girl on campus. After Anna went to Europe for a year, Ickes was invited to dinner at the Quadrangle Club by James Westfall Thompson, later a distinguished UC professor of mediaeval history (from whom I took two courses). Over a game of pool, Thompson told Ickes, "You have doubtless heard it reported that I am engaged to Miss Wilmarth. Well, I am." Ickes was crushed.

Ickes, then a reporter, lived in a fraternity house on campus, while Anna built a home (still standing) at 5747

Blackstone. Ickes was invited to live with the Thompsons, and he did so for years until Anna ousted Thompson for his indiscretions and fell in love with Ickes.

In 1903 Ickes, financed by Anna's mother, entered the University of Chicago Law School which had opened in 1902,

and graduated cum laude in 1907. In 1904 he required a mastoid operation, refused to go to a hospital, and underwent a disas trous operation on a kitchen table in an upstairs room at 5747 Blackstone. In 1905 Ickes met another Hyde Parker, Charles A. Merriam, political scientist, with whom he had close political relations the rest of his life. In 1909 he helped Merriam's success ful campaign for alderman. In 1911 he managed Merriam's unsuccessful cam paign for mayor. (Many Hyde Parkers worked on son Bob Merriam's unsuccess ful campaign for mayor in 1955.)

In 1909 Anna divorced Thompson and

in the summer of 1911 Ickes and Anna were married. They moved to a house in Evanston that Anna had built in 1910, and lived unhappily ever after. He should never have left Hyde Park!

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ttlt®IT

Volume 13 Numbcr4 Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

December, 1991

Eighty Years Around Hyde Park - What's Past Is Prologue

Excerpts from a talk by Leon M. Despres

before the Hyde Park Historical Society on April 14, 1991

Part Two:

In my childhood and early adolescence there were many Hyde Park meeting places. There were at least five motion picture theaters we depended on for entertainment. When there were political campaigns, there were meetings in hotel ballrooms, in theaters, in Shotwell Hall on 55th Street, in Rosalie Hall at 57th and Harper - a big meeting place - all of which have disappeared. Those meetings have given way to high tech. The radio became a substitute and after radio came television. Now video tapes provide much of the entertainment for which we used to depend on the motion picture theaters and meeting halls. Hyde Park is now much more a community of people tied to their homes that it was in most of the eighty years I lived in it.

We had drama groups in Hyde Park that functioned very well. It would be hard to imagine the Compass today or some of the other drama groups that originated in Hyde Park, because the places aren't here anymore. We have the excellent Court Theater, but not the half-dozen other little groups that appeared, flourished, waned, and reappeared.

Another influence which has altered Hyde Park is the impairment of security. In my childhood there were policemen on the beat. They walked the beat, and one got to know the policeman on the beat. He would walk around all day long and there would be someone around at night. There were police patrol cars, but no radio

phones. Now we have far more efficient general patrolling but we also have a general urban atmosphere of violence and crime. It's not peculiar to Hyde Park, but what it has done is to reduce and greatly alter the quality of night life in Hyde Park. In my childhood and well into my adulthood there was no thought of insecurity at night. And when insecurity came, there were some of us who thought, well, we have to show that it doesn't exist. Then, in 1967, I was shot at 55th and Dorchester. That feeling of insecurity represents an enormous change.

I think I'd like to mention the change in the churches. There were far more churches in my early days in Hyde Park. When I moved to Hyde Park there were no synagogues. There was a very small Jewish population in Hyde Park and no synagogues at all. There were lots of churches but many of them have disappeared. Then, starting in the 1920's synagogues came to Hyde Park, and many of them are gone. There's still an active, lively religions federation, the Hyde Park Interfaith Council, but there are only two synagogues and one of them is planning to leave.

One important aspect of the Hyde Park community during all these years was the relationship to the communities north and south. Woodlawn was a very important area for people who worked at the University. It was a great housing area for University personnel. And there was close

contact with the communities to the South and to the North, between Hyde Park and Woodlawn, between Hyde Park and Kenwood and Oakland, and also between Hyde Park and the area west of Washington Park. Today, after eighty years, Hyde Park is a circumscribed community with limited personal relations with the north, south, and west.

Hyde Park was almost lily white. Fortunately a few African American families lived in a few locations, including the 5500-5600 Lake Park, and the 5300 Maryland blocks. Hyde Park had its poor, many of them living in the buildings over the stores on 55th Street, but they were white. The real estate interests kept the community white by inducing property owners to sign legally enforceable racial restrictive covenants. Fortunately, however, there were African American pupils in my classes in the Ray School and Hyde Park High School. Without them, I would not have had good childhood racial peer group experiences.

There were no computers in the Ray School, but there was a shower room and a bath attendant, to give the blessings of salubrity to bath-less Ray School children. For me, it was an adventure one afternoon a week to be excused from class at the Ray Branch (56-Stony Island) to go to the main building for a shower. My Ray School showers were the first showers in my life. 5488 Everett had splendid bathtubs, but shower equipment was not then standard.

Continued on page 2

Eighty Years - Continued:

One of the great things that happened during those eighty years was urban renewal - a remarkable occurrence. If you look at it in context over a period of eighty years, you have to say it's really astonishing. Neither before nor since has there been such an amazing surge of community feeling, and it lasted about a dozen years. We owe a great deal to the people who pushed it and put it into effect. It's an amazing example of community leadership. You can say that safely now, although for a long time all we could do was criticize urban renewal and talk about its shortcomings and the poor quality of some of the planning and the economic discrimination, but in reality it was a remarkable achievement.

You know, for three years from 1949 to 1952, urban renewal was not exactly urban renewal. It was the grass roots activity of the community responding to the Supreme Court decision outlawing racial restrictive covenants against African Americans. The Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference took as its standard that this community should be a "racially

integrated community of high standards." The racial bars should be dropped and the community should strive for new standards. It took three years for the University of Chicago administration to join, but when it did, it joined wholeheartedly. However I think the greatest credit goes to the remarkable people who took the initiative at the beginning.

Hyde Park's organizations have always been exciting- this Historical Society, the Hyde Park Cooperative Society, the 57th Street Art Fair, the Conference, the South East Commission, the Service League, the Hyde Park newspapers, the religious organizations, the political organizations - all of them have made Hyde Park's life and my life richer.

In racial relations, the beginnings of full fraternity and opposition to racial discrimination really began with strength in the forties. It's hard to remember that the Lab School excluded black students. I went to the Lab School for three years

from 1916 to 1919 and am very grateful to it. It still had a lot of the benefits of Dewey's having founded and made it a progressive school. But there were no African American students in the Lab School. In 1943 our children were in the Lab School, and my wife and Fruma Gottschalk and others decided that the time had come to try to get the bars lowered. You can't imagine how difficult it was. You'd think it would be something you'd simply present to the University, present it to Robert Hutchins, and he would say, "Yes, you're right, we shouldn't have done this all these years and we'11 lower the bars." But it took about a year of hard work and finally the bars were lowered.

A couple of years before that it had been very difficult to get the bars lowered at the Quadrangle Club which excluded African Americans from membership. One faculty member, Allison Davis, was a very distinguished educator, whose faculty position had been funded by the Rosenwald Fund. The Fund extracted a commitment that he wouldn't try to join the Quadrangle Club; they thought it important that he be fully accepted as a faculty member without creating a storm.

Well, thanks to Milton Mayer and others (I joined in), we did break down the bars at the club.

In 1917 Chicago had had a very big immigration of African Americans. They came here for all kinds of jobs - in steel, in packing, and in all the service jobs. And so the area of black residency began expanding slowly. And that caused a lot of white people who lived at 23rd Street and 27th Street and 31st and 39th and 41st and so on to think of moving elsewhere. Lots of white people, including Jewish people, moved to Hyde Park. My family, my aunt and grandmother all moved to Hyde Park. Before there were synagogues here there was a Jewish population. I went to Sunday School at Sinai congregation and I had to take three street cars to get to 47th and King Drive (then Grand Boulevard) on Sunday mornings. You know it was in 1917 that the Real Estate Board committee passed a resolution that there should be no renting to blacks in any block until the previous block was filled. That became the policy of the real estate industry for a long time, even after the Supreme Court decision on restrictive covenants. The exciting change came in 1949 when Hyde Park really began to be an interracial

community of high standards, and when

finally the University of Chicago joined in and created the Southeast Chicago Com.mission.

It's always easy to reminisce about the past, but I think the important thing is to think about the present and the future.

What is most important is to consider how we can preserve and continue the vitality and creativity of Hyde Park. I think we do so by the organizations and centers that we continue to support. With technology and urban crime keeping people in their homes, organization activity becomes increasingly important as a way of bringing people together. The leadership of the University of Chicago or its absence of leadership have been very important in continuing the identity of Hyde Park. I was deeply impressed and thrilled by the community interest of the Beadles, particularly Muriel Beadle, when they were here. Especially important was Muriel Beadle's initiating, sponsoring, and pushing through Harper Court, a valuable Hyde Park resource and symbol. Just now the University leadership is active but not as active as it was. When the need arises,

I'm sure we'll have vigorous leadership again from the University.

We should profit also by our experience with decay. I told you about all those stores and the buildings on 55th Street. Well, I saw many of them decay. We're fortunate that urban renewal took many of them, perhaps a few too many. I remember the 27 saloons near 55th and Lake Park. I'm pleased to remember that once my father had to get some liquor to take home and he took me to a saloon to the free lunch counter. I'm pleased to remember that there was once free lunch in saloons. Then came the speakeasies in the same locations. It was exciting to go into a speakeasy and realize that the whole enterprise was a federal offense. It was great to have urban renewal remove buildings that had deteriorated terribly.

One of our big jobs now is to pinpoint future decay. And I think some of the problems of future decay will be even more difficult than the ones that we solved in urban renewal. It's more difficult to solve the decay of a huge high rise than the decay of a low-rise store or apartment building.

December, 1991 - page 2

Continued on page 3

Eighty Years - Continued

Collection of Stephen A. Treffman

The IC was a very important part of my life, up to recently. It isn't nearly as important now although it's certainly a genuine asset of the community. The tracks were originally on the ground and, in my childhood, the LC. put in new viaduct supports. They were huge beams, trunks of trees, and it was very, very nice because as these trunks of trees stood there they would begin to sprout branches and leaves, so we had a kind of a forest under the viaducts.

The Illinois Central, in my childhood, was run by coal, and coal was a curse in Hyde Park. There were three pollution curses we were aware of -we didn't know anything about PCB then, or any of those things - but the cinders and the coal pollution were awful. Nearly all the buildings were heated by coal. The Illinois Central was constantly spewing cinders: you•d see the train go by and you•d see burning cinders flying over the train. It was a great day when the Illinois Central was electrified about 1926.

The second pollution came from the steel mills. We used to see those red clouds above the steel mills and think how pretty they were. (I didn't know then about my wife's allergies.) The third, the one that I still can't understand our tolerating, was the stench from the stock yards. The fumes from rendering, depending upon wind, covered the area with a stench. And we tolerated this!

Fortunately we didn't know how injurious these pollutants were.

Of course the political contribution of Hyde Park is enormous. I had an intense interest in government but I had no idea of running for any office of any kind. I had

been counsel for the Illinois ACLU for seven years during the McCarthy period and, because of my great interest in government and politics, I was chairman of the Independent Voters of Illinois.

When Bob Merriam decided to run for

Mayor, he kept his decision quiet because he wanted to announce it suddenly to create excitement. He quietly called in five or six of us, including Louis Silverman, Bob Picken and Dick Meyer - I don't remember who else - and told us that he was going to run for Mayor and he would like to have a strong aldermanic candidate. He was a little embarrassed because his assistant wanted to run for alderman, and he believed that his assistant could not wage the kind of campaign Bob Merriam felt he needed to support his campaign for Mayor.

So we started to work. We said, sure, we•d find a candidate. And we went to excellent people, some of whom are in the community today. We went to Calvin Sawyier, we went to Alex Elson, but they wouldn't run. I can't remember everyone we went to; I just mention those because they were first rate candidates and would have been excellent aldermen if they had accepted. But they had commitments and weren't able to. We became desperate, it was Thanksgiving week, and we hadn't found anyone willing to run for alderman.

Then the committee met without me

and decided I should run for alderman. It was a great surprise to me because I had not planned on that, so I asked for three days to decide. I consulted a number of people, particularly a previous alderman, James Cusack, who was a personal friend. I then decided that there was a fighting

chance: we would have Merriam's support; we would have the M; and we would have the small Republican party in the ward which had agreed to support our choice. So with those three there was a chance; at least it would not be a disgraceful run. That's how the campaign started and that's how I ran. It was a tough fight and I had to go into a runoff.

At my first regular City Council meeting, a city employee asked me if I wanted to take part in the municipal pension program; did I want to authorize deductions from my salary. I was astounded that I was elected. I did not expect ever to be reelected, but I thought I ought to so that I could understand the pension system. Then I was in the City Council for twenty years! I got my pension. The only thing is, my top annual salary at the end of my aldermanic tenn was eight thousand dollars, so my pension is based on eight thousand dollars, and I get three hundred dollars a month. But I think it's wonderful to get three hundred dollars a month. Today aldermen get fifty five thousand dollars and if they stay in the Council for twenty years their pension is seven times as much.

Well I've given you a rapid over-view

of Hyde Park in eighty years. but I want to tell you I wasn't born in Hyde Park, I was born in St. Luke's Hospital, which was at 14th and Michigan Avenue, down the street from 4127 where I lived my first three years. Sometimes I take the No. 1 bus and ride past my birthplace. It sports a big plaque now, and the plaque says, "For Sale". Everything changes. What's past is prologue.

Decem r, 1991-page 3

Editors Note:

We know you will be delighted to read ::::!I

Jim Stronk'sfollow-up on Sam Hair's

mother's letter regarding Brookin's flight

-seepage 5.

Readers - please share your memories with us!

27 Sep 1991

Editor:

I was gratified to receive your letter of Sept. 17 with Jim Stronks' research about Brookins' flight in 1910 from Washington Park. I have had my mother's letter about it for some years and am happy that the Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter gave me a way to share it with others.

I often wondered what happened to Brookins on this flight and now I know, thanks to Jim Stronks, who went to the trouble to find out. The whole episode

now becomes more fascinating than ever. I was a pilot in the Navy (1941-46) so I have had an interest in aviation for a long time.

My mother kept a diary with entries every day for more than 60 years, and also wrote reminiscences of her girlhood in Clifton, IL, where her father, Mr.

Cummings, owned the grain elevator and the bank. They were living in Hyde Park at 5135 Dorchester after leaving Clifton in 1898. I will send you her reminiscences about the Iroquois Theater fire in 1903 when her sister Irene was among several hundred fatalities on that tragic day.

Am sending Jim Stronks a copy of this letter with my thanks to him for providing the happy ending to the Brookins story.

It is always a pleasure to hear from you and to read the Newsletter. I may be able to find more fragments about old Hyde Park among our family papers. If I think they are worth passing on, I will do so.

With kind regards, Samuel C. Hair Charlotte, NC

Correspondence

Hyde Park Historical Society:

On behalf of LILAC, I want to expCC$ iny great pleasure and our sincere appreciation for the Hyde Park Historical Society's efforts to provide a source of water for the landscaping project on the embankment around the Society headquarters. The water supply is crucial for the success of the project, and it is encouraging to see these preliminary steps in place before the major planting scheduled for Saturday, May 23, 1992.

In addition to the Historical Society's

work on installing a water spigot, the first few large trees and shrubs were planted as well as 1000 scilla and 750 daffodil bulbs. Most recently a very successful Christmas tree shredding created badly needed mulch for the plants now on the embankment.

Over 100 people brought their Christmas trees to the site which were shredded and blown onto the embankment by the Resource Center's mechanical shredder.

The community response to this project has been gratifying. Many people in the community have contributed both time and money to the project. We have raised approximately $1800, so far, toward this project, in addition to the $5000 grant from the Chicago Community Trust/ Mayor Daley's Urbs in Horto Tree Fund. This does not include the expenses the society has incurred in installing the water supply.

We look forward to the completion of this initial phase of the project and our continued cooperation in this venture.

Sincerely, Richard C. Pardo Chairman, LILAC

Landscaping Initiative for the Lake Park

Avenue Corridor January 5, 1992

December, 1991 - page 4

September 9, 1991 To: The Editor

Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter

In the July number you published Florence Cummings Hair's marvelous 1910 letter about an airplane talcing off from Washington Park in an attempt to win a newspaper's $10,000 prize by flying all the way to Springfield, Illinois. May I add a follow-up?

When the flying machine took off from the meadow that morning, Florence Hair went back to her home at 1447 East 52nd Street and wrote her husband Tom an excited letter. The "dainty ship," she said, rose "with astonishing grace and beauty," and "sped away in the sunshine like a glistening gold dragonfly." She is doing a washing, she tells Tom, but "My whole mind is fixed on that aeroplane, speeding over the country this sunny morning. H he isn't afraid, what a marvelous ride for that fellow!"

Florence Hair's vivid and lovely letter made me want to know more about the drama which drew most of Hyde Park to Washington Park that day. I turned to the Tribune for September 30, 1910, and there it was on page 1:

DARING YOUNG AVIATOR WINS

$10,000 AND AMAZES THOUSANDS EN ROUTE BY CONTROL OF MACHINE.

The flyer was Walter Brookins, age 22, a pupil of none other than Orville and Wilbur Wright, and now a salaried demonstration pilot for their airplane factory.

Florence Hair's "dainty dragonfly" was one of the Wrights' latest models, a biplane pushed by two propellers (which

Florence calls "the huge paddles"). Wilbur Wright himself, then 43, was one of the 30,000 in Washington Park that morning; the event would be priceless advertising for Wright airplanes, if it succeeded.

It had been announced that the flight would follow the Illinois Central tracks to Springfield, so the ICRR laid on a special train to chase the plane. After the take-off, when Florence Hair went home to finish her washing, Wilbur Wright rushed to the 63rd Street Station, boarded the train, and thus caught up with the airplane about 75 miles from Hyde Park, at Gilman, Illinois, where Brookins had landed in a pasture to take on more gasoline. Wright checked over his machine there, and again at Mount Pulaski, Brookins' second stop, and throughout the day kept the low-flying plane in sight from his car on the train. All along the ICRR route hopeful Illinoisans looking aloft were rewarded with what was for most of them their thrilling first sight of an airplane.

Today we hop from Meigs Field to Springfield in 45 minutes. But in 1910,

only seven years after Kitty Hawk, Brookins' air time for the 192 miles (he was not flying a beeline) was 5 hours, 49 minutes, for an average speed of 33 miles per hour. People drive faster than that down Hyde Park Boulevard today.

Brookins was slowed by a 10 mph headwind all the way, but his flight broke several U.S. records for distance.

When he landed at the State Fair Grounds, a huge throng cheered him as a hero of the new air age. Wilbur Wright, however, did not get carried away. Said

the Irih: "A dry smile and a short 'Pretty

Good' were his quota of praise."

Florence Hair's daring young man in the flying machine was tired from fighting the controls for a bumpy six hours of headwind, sitting without a cockpit to shelter him but strapped to the front of the machine in the open air, his whole body exposed to the buffeting, with the engine roaring only inches behind him. Once safely down, Brookins was proud of his success, but he quietly admitted that, "It was an awful trip."

Jim Stronks Chicago, Illinois

December, 1991 - page 5

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Hyde Park Historical Society 5529 S. Lake Park Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Volume 14 Number 1 and 2 Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

June, 1992

THE RELATIONSHIP

You know what a "relationship" is. When you are not quite sure what the connection between two people is, you say that they have a "relationship." I am going to say a few words - cautiously - about a relationship which has lasted 100 years. I speak of the relationship between the University of Chicago and Hyde Park Kenwood.

There is nothing ordinary, calm,

typical, or easy about Hyde Park - maybe you've noticed. And, there is nothing ordinary, calm, simple, or easy about the University of Chicago. The miracle is that there ever was a relationship, let alone one that lasted 100 years! But, of course, the other way of looking at it is that really, the two parties can't exist without one another, that they cling to each other, even if occasionally spitting in each other's face while clinging, if you get the picture...

1890-93

This clinging started with the conver gence of vision, patronage and good luck. The relationship had the good fortune to blossom in a burgeoning new town. Part of this burgeoning was the establishment, through a combination of private and public foresight, of a set of beautiful parks, Washington Park and Jackson Park, with a long promenade between them.

Along the promenade, there was mostly swamp, but certainly room for develop ment. Hyde Park had already become a growing town but I just want to tell you that the relationship I am seeking to tell you about his evening, in its incipient stage, like many incipient relationships, almost didn't get off the ground. Half was ready to begin, the Hyde Park half, but the other half of the relationship, the Univer sity of Chicago, was very iffy at first.

The American Baptist Education Society had already seen a Baptist college fail in Chicago and there was much doubt about the viability of another. In fact, it looked very much as if the Baptist institution would be placed at or in New York City. It is wonderful to read about those three years between 1889-91; it was remarkably on-again, off-again. In fact, only at the last minute did the Society's mind, the money, the choice of

Margaret Fallers

the first President and the gift of land all fall together to allow the relationship to get off and running. And I mean, running. Between the time President Harper finally agreed to come, on his terms; and Mr.

Rockefeller gave the first large sums, on his terms; and Mr. Marshall Field gave the first 10 acres, on his terms; and the Society agreed to support the undertaking, on its terms - between that confluence of events and the opening of the University of Chicago, only 18 months passed! The other half of the relationship was ready to begin.

I don't need to remind you that the World's Colombian Exposition was also coming into being during these same three years, and in just as iffy a fashion. The United States wanted to have a world's fair, but the national commission was very iffy about whether to put it in Chicago or in some other city. Furthermore, when the powers that were in Chicago finally persuaded Washington to have it in Chicago, these same powers couldn't decide whether to have it in the city center or out in the town of Hyde Park, taking advantage of the park system. Once the decision was taken to have it in Hyde Park, the fair also was created in whirl wind time - only a few months from beginning to end.

Continued on page 2

100 Years - Continued

During the last two weeks I had the fun of reading the two most detailed contem porary accounts of the founding of the University of Chicago and one about the Columbian Exposition. The most remark able thing I found was that the University was not mentioned, not even one mention, in the book about the fair and the fair was not mentioned, even in passing, in the two accounts about the founding of the University! I have to guess that they didn't mention each other because both founding groups were so incredibly involved in

their own affairs during these years that they didn't have a moment to spare.

The relationship had ignited - and the world came to see.

Now if you're going to start a relation ship - that's the way to do it. Invite 25 million people on the first date.

FOOTBALL

I know it is only possible to smile now when football in Hyde Park is mentioned. But let me tell you that in those Stagg years, football greatly assisted the rela tionship to thrive - Big Ten teams, raccoon coats, the bells in Mitchell Tower playing each evening at 10:00 p.m. to indicate that athletes should be in bed, parties all weekend. If I am understanding it right, football dominated the fall both for the University and for the community, with the north and west stands filled with Maroon supporters and the south stand with those of the opponent.

Of course, it is true that by the time I can remember football in Stagg Field, anyone who could walk up the bleachers could get a ticket, usually for free, to sit in the west stands along with all the newspa per boys of Chicago. But football still

some of what we know comes from our founder's book, Hyde Park Houses. But tonight, I just want to mention one aspect of this growth not so often remembered

now. It was the subject Jean Block was working on when she died.

Right after the turn of the century and up to the period of the Second World War, for the affluent families in Hyde Park there were increasingly fewer young women recently over from Europe to be house servants and the community had very few restaurants of style, so families long accustomed to house servants and cooks, moved into the newly built apartment hotels which had family apartments and dining rooms. These apartment hotels ranged from rather modest ones like the Beatrice or the Blackstone to the Shoreland which was sumptuous. Jean was collecting informa tion about these apartment hotels when she died. She thought that it was an interesting, if brief, period in the history of our community and it was one of the many adaptations which the community made to keep itself diversified and comfortable.

CHURCHES, SYNAGOGUES AND SEMINARIES

Now this relationship has had a religious aspect too. The University started out to look like any other 19th century college established by a denomi nation to increase the number of educated brethren and to train clergy. That was what a great many of the Baptists thought they were doing when they pressed in the 1880's for a Baptist Training School in the Midwest to replace the one which had recently failed. However, partly through guile and slight of hand and partly in response to the new scientific spirit of the times, as the plan developed it became clear that the newly appointed first

He also committed the institution to sexual equality. The community liked it and the churches and synagogues which came to the community reflected the com munity's tolerance, ecumenicalism and expectation of learned clergy. In fact many denominations located their seminaries in Hyde Park at least partly because of the tone and atmosphere of the community and the University. We have Meadville Lombard Theological School, Chicago Theological Seminary, McCormick Seminary, Catholic Theological Union, Lutheran School of Theology, etc., and even more fun, (only in Hyde Park?) the Jesuits moved in with the Lutherans, the students from CTU take classes with the Baptists and the student clergy from these seminaries offer services, help and enthusiasm to the local churches and synagogues.

The seminaries and their faculties and students have greatly added to the sophis tication, ecumenicalism and diversity of the community. The connections with the University's divinity school and other academic units have added to the strength of the religious institutions of Hyde Park Kenwood. It is another part of the relationship.

The churches and synagogues have been stronger and more diversified because of the tone set by the relationship we are celebrating tonight. Important clergymen and rabbis came to lead these churches and synagogues because the University was here and because of their challenging congregations. And these churches and synagogues were not exclusive; many connections were made by the clergymen themselves as they combined to assist the community and each other. Students took, and take, courses in each others' seminaries and young people go to various churches or synagogues depending upon the program. I always like to tell people from outside Hyde Park about the Young Peoples' Church Club I belonged to when I was in high school in the Hyde Park Baptist Church at the comer of Woodlawn and 56th. Our president was at various times an Episcopalian, a Jew and a Catholic, as well as a Baptist. It was this kind of

community and understanding which

needs to be mentioned here.

HOUSING AND BUSINESSES

Many of you know a great deal about the growth of Hyde Park and Kenwood. You know about styles and decoration as well as architects and planners. You know about businesses and restaurants which supported our community and our relationship as it grew. And, of course,

President had in mind not a college but a new creature called a graduate university and not a denominational institution but a secular and universal one. Except for the Board of Trustees, the Articles of Incorpo ration said that there would be no religious test "or particular religious

profession... held as a requisite for admission to the University or to any department belonging thereto."

made it pos Chicago to b university w first with a w

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June, 1992 - page 2 Continued on Page 3

100 Years - Continued

SOCIAL AGENCIES

From the first days of the University and the first days of Hyde Park there has been a mutually supportive effort to contribute to the community and the city with help for those less fortunate. In the early years, there was both University and community support for the University Settlement House, the Neighborhood Club, the Child Care Society and more recently, the Blue Gargoyle and Ronald McDonald House. The University has contributed faculty to help train social workers, it has provided a forum for discussion of social policy, and its faculty and students have been active in assisting in the social endeavors, along with many talented neighbors.

JAPANESE RELOCATION

Recently I went to Dr. Walter Palmer's 90th birthday party - many of you were there. At the party, I met an old friend of mine, an artist who lives in Hyde Park, the mother of a close friend of one of my daughters. I said to her "Natsuko Takehita, how do you know Dr. Palmer?" She said, "When I came out of the camps, I lived at the Palmers." That is a reminder of one of the times that Hyde Park and the Univer sity had an opportunity to use their unique talents effectively. As you know, after the shameful detention of the California Japanese in camps at the beginning of World War II, public opinion finally came to its senses and asked that those in the camps be relocated. The government chose 4 or 5 communities which had

major institutions to be pilot relocation areas; Hyde Park was one of those. In the beginning only young people could leave the camps and only when the community to which they were going could guarantee a job and a place to stay. Many of the detainees came to Hyde Park and we have benefited ever since by their many contributions.

URBAN RENEWAL

Any relationship has some features about which the parties are not proud or are even ashamed. The restrictive cov enants of the period from after the first world war to the second are such a feature; contracts which denied open housing to Jews and later to Blacks. But after the war, the University and the community agreed to take steps to eliminate these practices although it is probably necessary to say that in some cases prodding from the law was required.

But that said, problems remained.

Buildings in the neighborhood were deteriorating, there was a rise in crime and the nature of the community was chang ing. There was a short period when our relationship threatened to come apart; separation was considered. But as half the people here can testify, in spite of dis agreements as to what to do and even more disagreements as to how to do it, both halves of the relationship decided to buckle down and undertake urban renewal to try to stop the deterioration and to build and rebuild to make us a proud, integrated, diversified and open community. We have not solved all problems but we couldn't have done as much as we have done so far if it hadn't been for our solid relationship.

SCHOOLS

There is so much to say about this relationship and schools that I dare not start. University and community members have worked endlessly to keep ahead of troubles. University students and others from the University work daily in the local schools to be of help. To keep our schools, public and private, supportive of, and helpful to, young people in the modem world is the greatest challenge this relationship has. We have done many things well in the schools, but we see much to do. We must not be overwhelmed or discouraged because we must do better. If it were the only thing the two halves of this relationship did in tandem for the next 10 years, it would justify the relationship.

BOOKSTORES

Our community has the best bookstores in the city, possibly in the United States, because of our relationship. Jack Cella tells me that someone from another city approached him with the idea of setting up a franchise of the Seminary Coop Book store and 57th Street Books. He explained to the man that it couldn't be done because they don't have Hyde Park!

CONCLUSION

On that note I will conclude, aware of the many things unsaid. What has made this relationship even more difficult over time, not to mention difficult as the conceit of my talk, is that the parties to the relationship are impossible to define.

What is the University? You know the wonderful story about the students in the 60's who had a huge petition with numerous signatures who wanted to give it to the head of the university. They took it one night to President Levi's house and he told them that he wasn't the head of the University, the faculty were the people who ran this university. The next day they approached the Spokesman for the University Senate to give it to him. He told them that he didn't head the Univer sity; the Trustees were the people in charge. They went to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees and he said that at this university the Board of Trustees does not have anything to do with running the university, that they only devote them selves to the fiscal support of the univer sity. The petition didn't get delivered.

That may be confusing enough, but as we

all know faculty and students represent a wide range of opinions and characters; certainly they don't speak as one. What should I say when people approach me in the Coop and ask me, "What does the University think about parking permits?" "What is the University doing about the shopping center?"

Well, what about the other half of the relationship? Even you wouldn't claim that Hyde Park can speak as one. What does Hyde Park think about the new park on 53rd Street?

We will bring this to an end by saying that this relationship over the last 100 years has been one in spirit, not in opinion, and we trust that it will be thus for the next 100 years.

JuM, 1992 - page 3

At Our Annual Meeting:

Victor Obenhaus was commended for his years of service on the Board.

Bob and Alta Blakely win Cornell Honorable Mention.

Ed Campbell described Cornell Award winners.

Photos by Linda Baskin

Cornell Award to Augusta Bloom

by Stephen Treffman

The Board of the Hyde Park Historical Society has bestowed upon Augusta G. Bloom a Paul Cornell Award for her gift to our Society of many hundreds of photographic negatives produced by her late husband, Charles G. Bloom. The vast majority of these negatives are views of Hyde Park buildings and residents and date from the 1970s to 1980s. Enriching the gift were sixty photographs produced by Mr. Bloom, most of them views of Pullman but also some of Hyde Park.

Mrs. Bloom's gift is a very important addition to our archives and will, doubt lessly, be one of its more significant holdings. The negatives in this collection have been well-protected, and many of them are dated and labeled.

Charles Bloom was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on February 8, 1920, and he died September 16, 1987. He attended the University of Cincinnati but left in 1942 to serve as a flight navigator in the U.S. Air Force during World War II. He attained the rank of First Lieutenant and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with three clusters.

He capie to live in Hyde Park in 1946

and worked for many years as a New York Central Railroad switchman and yard conductor in the road's Englewood yards. In 1963 he received a master's degree from the University of Chicago and began teaching, first at Hyde Park High School and later at Kennedy-King College. He was very active in railway worker and teacher unions throughout his careers.

The political life of the community also drew his interest and he served in the campaigns for office of Abner Mikva, Leon Despres, and Robert Mann, and was, himself, an officer at the state level of the Independent Voters of Illinois. He became a professional photographer during the 1970s, working for the Hyde Park Herald and the University of Chicago. He exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Fair and locally.

Editors Note:

Another Cornell Award went to Janet Burch and Joel Juillory, who beautifully restored their 1903 home after it was ravaged by.fire in 1989. More on their

excellent work in our next issue.

June, 1992- page 4

photo -Alta Blakley

Double House Wins Cornell Award

by Mary C. Lewis

One of the Paul Cornell Awards presented at the Hyde Park Historical Society's annual meeting was given to Sheila and Robert Bator for the exterior restorative work done on their 1886 double house at 5418-20 South Blackstone. Since the Bators' double house is also owned and occupied by Alta and Robert Blakely, they were awarded honorable mention for sharing in the labor. Alta Blakely is a board member of the Hyde Park Historical Society and hence was not eligible for a full award.

Before the Bators and Blakelys began the work of applying a varied palette of colors, the two couples stripped 100 years of tan and brown trim paint from the front of the building. Then the two couples discussed various choices and agreed on six colors: royal blue and light blue, light and dark grey, cream, and bordeaux red. During July and August, 1991, with the help of Dan Smith, a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, nine coats of paint were applied meticulously to the siding, trim, porch posts and other decorative spots to both halves of the building. The result of their joint effort is a lively palette of colors in the style of a Queen Anne "painted lady" widely popular in San Francisco and growing in appeal among owners of Victorian homes in this area.

The joint venture is noteworthy for several reasons. Alta Blakely believes that double house owners need a great deal of neighborliness and consensus to team up for a project like this; she notes that even though she and her husband left on vacation during the summer of 1991, the work proceeded smoothly while they were gone. In addition, the couples undertook some further restoration when they decided to remove the oval medallions over the front porches. Hyde Park carpen ter Steve Cory built new frames for the medallions, hand scraped them to remove the former paint, and repainted them using the six new colors. The additional effort reveals a great deal of cared detailing and lends an eye-catching charm to the exterior.

The Cornell Award is the second prize won for the Bators' and Blakelys' efforts. Last fall the double house won first place in the South Chicago region of the "painted lady" competition sponsored annually by the Chicago Paint and Covering Association. The competition features winners from around Chicago and its collar counties.

Alta Blakely credits her daughter with getting them started on the idea of redoing the house in the "Painted Lady" style. She made drawings to show some ideas for color schemes, and that helped the two couples discuss the combinations they

wanted. Although a few books exist about Victorian exteriors, Alta says that they relied mainly on their own brainstorming and other given notions. "We had to start with grey as a basic color," she explained, "because the siding is grey and we weren't interested in replacing that. We also like blue as a basic color." Most Victorian exterior restoration lends itself to basics such as those; brighter colors - such as the bordeaux red used by the Bators and Blakelys - are added to the details.

The paint job on the 1886 double house

compliments that of a growing number of Victorian exterior restorations in Chicago, including three other houses in the 5400 block of South Blackstone. The Blakelys and Bators are glad that the colors they chose fit in well with others in Hyde Park. Now that spring has arrived, a walking tour of the neighborhood might give home owners some ideas for ways to brighten the exteriors of their own houses. For lists of houses to see, consult Jean Block's book, Hyde Park Houses, or a self-guided walking tour brochure, both available for purchase at the Hyde Park Historical Society, Saturdays and Sundays, 2:00-4:00 p.m.

June, 1992- page 5

Correspondence

I had seen this show with Edgar Esson. I then had gone to Ottawa, Illinois, for a visit with Vera La Clair, whose brides maid I was to be in June.

I had been up all night, nearly, at a ball which announced the engagement of Vera

Sam Hair, from whom we have had such wonderful tales of early Hyde Park, has sent another of his mother's historic recollections. We are enormously grateful to Mr. Hair for his willingness to share these documents with us.

Please send us any of your family's (or your own) accounts of events which are important or interesting ( or both) for our collection and documentation of Hyde Park history.

Dear Editor:

You mentioned that you might be interested in my mother's account of the Iroquois Theater fire in 1903, so I am enclosing it herewith.

Considering that she was then 20, and her sister Irene 17, it is a singularly unemotional account. She and Irene were closest in age in the family of four daughters and one son, and were constant childhood and teenage companions, yet she says little about her own feelings in this tragic event where she was the one who had to identify the body.

Also enclosed is a brief biography of my mother. They then lived at 5135 Madison Ave., now Dorchester.

FLORENCE CUMMINGS HAIR, was

born April 11, 1883, in Clifton, Illinois. She went to local schools, and when the Cummings family moved to Chicago in 1894 she went to Hyde Park High School, Ferry Hall (Lake Forest, IL), and the University of Chicago. She married Thomas J. Hair in October 1906. They lived in Chicago until 1945, when they moved to Tryon, North Carolina. Her husband died March 1973, age 93 years, 11 months. She died in March 1975, age

92. There were three children - Thomas, Eleanor, and Sam. She kept a diary every day for 60 years, and also left some written reminiscences, of which the following survives.

WHATIREMEMBERABOUTTHE IROQUOIS THEATER FIRE IN 1903

by Florence Cummings Hair

In 1903, I was 20 years old, and my sister Irene was 17. My father, Robert Fowler Cummings, was graduated from Lake Forest Academy in 1867, never losing his interest in this fact, so it was natural that he should send his daughter, Marion, to do two years of college in Ferry Hall, graduating in 1897. I was also booked for my two years of college at Ferry Hall, to graduate in 1904.

That summer, Irene and I found a "Fortune Teller" who for $1.00 each, was said to be - It was an awful price to pay, in those days. I think my "fortune" said I'd be the "power behind the throne" idea for a husband. But Irene's "fortune" said she was to have a very serious illness and her life would be saved by our family doctor.

The Iroquois Theater was new - what was called "an extravaganza." The key fact is that the entrance was at one side, not in front, and this confused the audi ence. The ingenue was seen to be in a huge swing. In flimsy, inflammable gauze, she was swung from back stage way back and out over the audience. When the swing became ignited, the audience did not know how to get out, and many deaths were caused by this confusion. Ralph Stevens' two sisters (friends of mine) were there and were saved from being trampled to death by pulling themselves up by grabbing a man's belt. Their clothing was burning but help was at hand for those two anyway.

Irene and Adelaide Baker and a third girl had bought first balcony seats.

Adelaide was living with an elderly aunt who was ill at this moment, and Adelaide insisted that she (Adelaide) stay home with the sick woman, who refused to let her. The third girl was living with her widowed sister (a Ferry Hall friend of Marion's and mine). This girl had had repeated dreams of being in a burning building, unable to get out. Perhaps it was natural for the older sister to talk her out of this repeated dream and to go to the theater as planned.

and Luther Perkins, so when I got an early start from Ottawa, that morning, I was very tired. When I heard about the fire, I sat in our parlor at 5135 Madison Ave. waiting for Dr. James W. Walker to call from some hospital saying that he had found Irene. When he did call, he said, "This is going to be a matter of identifica

tion. ·no not let Mr, Cummin s come down to the "Loop" or there will be another to seek. I shall want Florence at 5

a.m. if she can get an hour or so of rest

until then."

That trip to the "Loop" was a horror.

Dreadful details were being told all around us. We heard later that 50 people were alerted to look for Irene.

Our first stop was at a building where some scores of bodies were awaiting identification. I saw our dentist's mother - a good friend of ours. From there we'd buy the last flash-editions of the papers, and we'd tramp in melting show, or take a streetcar, hour after hour. Finally there was just one more place to see - only four bodies there. And I said "And then what?" and the doctor said, "We'd have to start all over again."

I was able to recognize what was left of Irene's clothing (underwear, etc.) at twelve o'clock noon (we'd been looking since 5:30 a.m.). The doctor called mother and we got an lliinois Central train for 51st Street. I saw someone on the street that I knew and the doctor said, "You are not to say anythin to anybody about what we've done. I will tell your mother all that is necessary."

I remember that I went up to the 3rd floor front room (Lenore's bedroom) and slept for hours. Later the doctor called and said, "Someone has identified Irene's body as her sjster's bo<ly. Does that worry you?" and I said "No. I know that girl well. There is no mistake." The doctor said, "Those in the first balcony died of suffocation from smoke. The fire came later."

My father wanted to take mother away and planned a West Indies tour. At Ferry Hall, I was expecting to graduate in June and still had one paper to write. Miss Sargent (head of F.H.) insisted that I should go on the West Indies Tour and write that paper later.

June, 1992 - page 6

Correspondence

Our Archivist, Steve Treffman, whose postcard photo of the old Ra,y School Annex (presently the site of the Brete Hart school) was pictured in our last newslet ter, shares this interesting correspondence from his fellow collector, Harold T. Wolff:

Dear Steve,

While researching a totally different topic, I came upon the following architec tural references:

"Architect M. L. Beers:...For District No. 1, Hyde Park, four-room schoolhouse, to be erected on Fifty-sixth street, east of

I.C.R.R. track. The peculiarity of this building will be that it is to resemble in appearance a private dwelling, it being located in a private dwelling quarter, and the location being secured on these terms. It will be three stories high, with an area of 96 by 45 feet; the exterior construction will be stone, basement high, followed by pressed brick to the second story, and the remainder will be of slate; the interior finish will be in Georgia and clear white pine; cost about $15,000."

-"Synopsis of Building News," Inland Architect and News Record , Volume 13, Number 7, June, 1889,

page 91, column 2.

Note also the following, which appears on another page of the same issue and may be an earlier or later press release on the same building:

"Architect M. L. Beers: For District No. 1, Hyde Park, two-story school building, 30 by 90 feet; to be built at Fifty sixth street; cutstone exterior, slate roof; cost $15,000."

-"Synopsis of Building News," IM

Inland Architect and News Record, Volume 13, Number 7, June, 1889,

page 92, column 1.

. Jean Block, in her book Hyde Parle

also recognizes Beers for his work in Hyde Park. She writes:

Beers was born in Ohio in 1847. His father was a builder and named his son after the French architect and writer Minard Lefever, known in this country for his Modem Builders' Guide (1833); Beauties of Modern Architecture (1835); and The Architectural Instructor (1856).

His father's ambitions for him being apparent from birth, Beers learned carpentry at home and then studied with Joseph Ireland, an architect in Cleveland, Ohio. Arriving in Chicago in 1871, he worked as a draughtsman for Otis Leonard Wheelock, and then went into partnership with Oscar Cobb for a few years. When he came to Hyde Park in 1877 he went into practice on his own. He built a number of houses in the area as well as schools and other public buildings. Unfortunately, only a very few examples of his work remain; unpretentious, simple family homes, dating from the late eighties and early nineties, they are representative of a much larger number, now demolished.

Minard Lefever Beers (1847-1918) 5411 Harper 1889

5318 Blackstone 1880

5410Harper b. 1880 Beers, Clay and Dutton

5247 University 1891

5601-03 Dorchester 1892

June, 1992 - page 7

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Hyde Park Historical Society 5529 S. Lake Park Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Mr. & Mrs. John A. McDermott 4811 s. Kimbark Ave.

Chicago, IL 6061S

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ttlt®IT

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

SHIPWRECKS OFF HYDE PARK

Jim Stronks, HPHS member, brings us some wonderfully interesting research about serious happenings right off Hyde Park's lake shore and some concurrent goings-on in the town as well. We are grateful to Jim/or his contribu tions (remember his follow-up on Brookins' prize-winning airplane flight?) to our store of Hyde Park history. lfyou have a story to tell, please share it with us.

October1992

by Jim Stronks

One of our sister institutions is the Chicago Underwater Archaeological Society, an organization of scuba divers who locate and explore sunken ships. In a recent program at the Chicago Historical Society, their spooky underwater videos whetted my curiosity: were there shipwrecks in our Hyde Park waters? I found that there are indeed; they are lying out there this minute. I checked the divers' records against a variety of sources, especially old newspapers at Regenstein Library, to learn the story of these sinkings.

We do not realize the volume of shipping in Chicago's early decades. In one month, October 1869, four years after the Civil War, 1721 vessels docked in the Chicago River and its branches, sometimes double-parked. On November 15, 1869, which I cite solely because the microfilm of the Chicago Times happens to be legible for that date, no fewer than 119 ships put into Chicago in one day, and on some days there were over 300, most of them compara tively small ships, it is true. Most were sailing ships, that is under canvas, and of shallow draft, thus vulnerable to Lake Michigan's hard blows from the northeast, which broke many a ship against the western shore and sent others to the bottom with all hands lost. In fact, on the very next day, November 16, 1869, there were 35 sailing ships wrecked on Michigan and her sister lakes, plus ten steam ers. Two days later the Times said the storm from the northeast "has been almost terrible beyond example," and reported a wreck not far from Hyde Park, at the foot of 35th Street, where the Ringgold had smashed ashore upon the property of the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas.

Most early wrecks were well north of Hyde Park

because shipping was usually headed for the river,

Entrance to Chicago River Harper's Monthly, 1879

bringing in mountains of lumber and coal (and once a young woman from Holland who became my grand mother). Later, the rise of Gary and Calumet Harbor meant more ships passing Hyde Park, and some of these ended on the bottom too.

For example, did anyone here see the Tacoma sink off Jackson Park on November 4, 1929? Lying today in 32 feet of water, the Tacoma is a favorite of underwater archaeolo gists (I love that name) because most of her hull and deck, 73 feet long by 18 feet wide, remain intact. Her blunt proportions tell her role in life; the Tacoma was built, in Benton Harbor in 1894, to be a dredge tug. And on the day when "the ancient tub sprang a yawning leak," as the Tribune elegantly put it, she was plying her honest trade, pulling two scows at a point 1.1 mile from the 68th Str et crib. It was12:30, noontime, when her wooden hull spht open and Captain Fred E. Stubbins blew four blasts, a distress signal. The Coast Guard at Jackson Park heard, dashed out, and saved the crew of six, while another tug arrived to take over the tow.

(But the sinking of the Tacoma and the storybook rescue won only two inches at the bottom of page 2. By

continued on page 2

contrast, the Tribune gave reruns of breathless copy that day to the Chicago Civic Opera's first performance in tis new skyscraper home on Wacker Drive. Hyde Parkers who missed the gala "Aida" could have gone instead to see Loretta Young in "Fast Life" at the Piccadilly, adults only, or down to 63rd Street to see Lionel Barrymore in "Myste rious Island" at the Tower, or Richard Arlen in "Four Feathers" at the Maryland, or Claudette Colbert in ''The Lady Lies" at the Tivoli.)

For a body of water seemingly so calm and beautiful, Lake Michigan has been a terror for killing ships and sailors, especially during that frightful autumn of 1929.

On September 9 the Andaste sank in a storm with 25 lives lost. On the 24th the ferry Milwaukee, loaded with 26 railway cars, went down in mid-lake with a loss of 52 lives. On the 29th the Wisconsin, combined freight and passenger, which had left Navy Pier for Milwaukee with a cargo of new automobiles, sank off Kenosha with 12 lives lost. On October 30th the Tribune summed up: "Three Shipwrecks on Lake Claim 89 Lives in Fifty Days"-but the lake was not finished. At noon on November 1, the freighter Senator, loaded with shiny new Nash cars, was rammed in the fog by the ore boat Marquette and sank in minutes off Port Washington at the cost of another 12 lives. Compared to these disasters, the sinking of the tug Tacoma four days later was small potatoes.

But it was big news when the majestic David Dows gave up the ghost off Jackson Park in 1889. A 5-masted barkentine of 1347 tons, 278 feet in length, 38 in beain, built in Toledo in 1881, the David Dows was designed to carry 140,000 bushels of grain from Chicago to eastern ports on the Great Lakes. On November 29, 1889, she was returning with 2053 tons of anthracite in bitter cold weather when, "SWEPT BY ICY GALES," her hold flooding, and "one mass of ice from stem to stern,'' she settled in 40 feet of water at 2:45 p.m. Her crew had time to lash themselves to the rigging, which extended well above the lake level, so were taken off safely by the tug Chicago. except that many of their severely frozen hands and feet would have to amputated. Later the Coast Guard dynamited the five masts sticking up out of the lake so as to clear that traffic lane for navigation, but the huge hull and deck, and some of the anthracite, are still down there right side-up and regularly visited by admiring scuba divers.

Four more shipwrecks off Hyde park have been mapped, but I have been unable to find their stories in the blurred microfilm of old newspapers. It is a matter of record that the schooner Hercules, 60 tons, the first known Lake Micpigan wreck, went down 3/4 mile off what is now 63rd Street on October 3, 1818. The lumber schooner

McKay sank 3-1/2 miles off 51st Street in November 1856. The tug E. L. Anthony burned and sank off 59th Street on July 8, 1885. And the Teddy. a little 8-ton steainer built in

2 - October 1992

Traffic, Downtown Chicago Harper's Monthly, 1879

Manitowoc in 1903, foundered and sank off 79th on April 24, 1918, when all the papers were delirious with war news.

But the shipwreck closest home, and truly a Hyde Park event in its day, was the death of the Silver Spray only 200 yards off 49th Street. There, on Morgan Shoal, on the north edge of what was called Chicago Beach, she met her end on July 15, 1914. Her pathetic remains are still visible from the shore today.

A strong northeast wind had pounded the lakefront with waves on July 14, and four Chicagoans had drowned, but the wind seems to have subsided and was apparently not a factor on the 15th. Whatever the cause, the helmsman of the Silver Spray would seem to have been- unaccountably, amazingly- ignorant of the Hyde Park Sands, that extensive cluster of shallows and sandbars clearly marked on every sailor's chart, visible from high-rise apartment windows, and marked by a red buoy today.

The Silver Spray. actually the fifth boat of that name on the Great Lakes, was built in Ludington in 1894 and had at first been gaily christened Bloomer Girl. She was a pleasure craft, as the Tribune called her, the kind which people rode from the Chicago River to the Columbian Expo in 1893, or which later they boarded at Navy Pier for a Sunday ride upon the lake. Pictures of such craft suggest that she probably fit Mark Twain's adjectives for another boat, "long and sharp and trim and pretty."

Specifically, Silver Spray was a wooden passenger steamer of 95 tons, 109 feet in length, 22 in beam, valued at $10,000-but uninsured at the time of her death. On that day she was running close to shore because she had been chartered to carry 200 University of Chicago students to Gary to see the steel mills. From exactly which pier they were to embark is unknown; perhaps some Society member can fill in the story for us.

No passengers were aboard when Silver Spray (nee Bloomer Girl) ran aground in only eight feet of water in

continued on page 3

full sight of hundreds of bathers at Chicago beach. A powerful launch from the life-saving station at Jackson Park harbor and two excursion boats were unable to pull her free-and then it happened. She turned over, and according to one account killed three crewmen. Sailors will tell you it is considered unlucky to change a boat's name.

(On July 16 the Tribune gave the event only two inches on page 4- "Bathers See a Shipwreck; Silver Spray on Reef'-and the Daily News said nothing at all. Not that the papers were preoccupied with the approach of World War

I. The guns of August would explode soon enough, but Hyde Parkers might still have gone to the movies that July night with a light heart, if they liked the jittery 2-reelers of 1914. Summer people at the Chicago Beach Hotel on 51st Street could walk two blocks west to the Beach movie house to see a Keystone Comedy and "The Night Hawks," an Essanay film probably shot in Chicago. The Hyde Park Theatre, at 5314 Lake Park, where the bank drive-in is now, was showing "Lillian's Dilemma" with Wally Van; the Jefferson, at 1523 East 55th, where the Deco Arts Building is today, advertised simply "Feature Photo Plays Daily," 5¢ and 10¢; and the Campus, at 1316 East 61st Street, was showing "Women Against Women.")

But to return to the wreck of the Silver Spray on Hyde Park Sands, eventually the lake tore her top off, then slowly beat her to pieces, but her heart lies out there yet, that is to say her boiler and propeller. Richardson's .

Chartbook and Cruisin Guide (1979) indicated that the wreckage extended above the surface. Today it lies ten inches below, but when the wind is right you can see the boiler heave into view, as big as a car, if you know exactly where to look and are patient. The best vantage point is looking straight out 200 yards from the "No Alcoholic Beverages" sign which is fifty paces north of the public telephone at 49th Street.

No buoy marks the spot, but on certain days when all the rest of Lake Michigan is quiet and smooth, you may be startled to see frothing white rollers mysteriously tumbling over each other for no visible reason at 49th Street. It is very striking. It seems a ghostly commotion. And indeed it marks the reef that killed the hapless Silver Spray. Hyde Park's own shipwreck.

Watch for it.

Reproductions of tickets for the Columbian Exposition, 1893

These and postcard reproductions are available at Society headquarters.

October 1992 - 3

The South Shore Country Club was founded in 1906. On its 50th Anniversary in 1956, the Club published a very impressive Anniversary Book, a copy of which was recently given to the Historical Society by a thoughtful friend. Below we reprint from that book the story of the Club's beginnings as told on the Club's 40th anniversary by the founder himself, Mr. Lawrence Heyworth.

The Founders Own Story

Back in 1905 when I was President of the Chicago Athletic Club I conceived the idea of having a Country Club in connection with the Athletic Club so the members of the Athletic Club could enjoy dining and wining in a beautiful place out in the country instead of having to resort to dives and saloons, which at that time were about the only avail able suburban places.

This idea was taken from the New YG>rk Athletic Club which owned Travers Island, a beautiful country club about fifteen miles from New York City, situated on Long Island Sound.

The grounds of the South Shore Country Club were at that time owned by Elisha W. Willard of Providence, Rhode Island. On my trips out in the country I used to take the children to this spot and have old man Barnes, a fisherman, fry perch for us on the spot where the shooting lodge now stands. It was from these trips that I came to the conclusion that this would be an ideal spot for the country club.

I sent out letters to members of the Chicago Athletic Club with this project in view, but received only a few acceptances, not sufficient to carry out my plans on this project. Still determined to build the club on this very advantageous site, I asked Mr. Honore Palmer, son of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Harry Honore, her brother, Mason B. Staring and W. C. Thorne to join me as a committee and help promote the club.

We then sent out about 1,000 letters to the most promi nent people in Chicago and received only twenty-one acceptances, nearly all from members of the Calumet Club. This was a K.O. after I had already negotiated for the property through Bert Winston, and agreed to pay person ally $30,000 down and $245,000 in twenty-four years with interest at 4½% on deferred payments.

I was certainly holding the bag and upon thinking the matter over thoroughly as to what to do next, conceived the idea of getting some better known and bigger names as directors. I telephoned Ogden Armour and asked him if he would be a director of the proposed Country Club to be built out at Seventy-First Street and the Lake, and if I could use his name as a director on one circular letter only. This I wished to use for promotional purposes to help finance the club. He laughed and asked me what other obligations he would be under and I told him he would have to buy a perpetual membership in the club, if the club was success fully organized, and he replied, "All right, go ahead and use my name."

4 - October 1992

"Tlte Fine,, Club Of All"

After I obtained Mr. Armour's consent to directorship I telephoned Mr. Black, who at that time was President of the Continental National Bank, and I asked him if I could use his name also. Mr. Black consented and then in the same manner I obtained the consent of Mr. Forgan of the First National Bank, Mr. Smith of the Merchants Loan Bank and Mr. John J. Mitchell of the Illinois Trust & Savings Bank. In fact, the presidents of seventeen loop banks consented to their names being used as directors on the second letter sent out to the public.

About this time a committee of irate Bryn Mawr-South

Shore residents walked into the Mutual Bank of which I was president, and threatened to stop the South Shore Country Club completely and to niake matters worse, they had the right to do so. This committee, as I remember, was com posed of State Senator Clarke, Aid. Bennett, Mr. French, a lawyer, and Mr. Brandenbury, who was Commissioner of Public Works, and several other prominent citizens. They said they were going to put a stop to the organizing of the Country Club, that 67th, 68th, 69th, and 70th Streets were to be extended through to the lake, that the City of Chicago owned this property and the City was going to open up these streets.

I asked all of them to step into the director's room of the

Mutual Bank and asked each of them individually where he banked and then told them that the presidents of their banks were directors of the Club. I then said to them, "Are you going to fight the presidents of your banks where you borrow money and stop the organization of a club of which these same gentlemen are directors?"

I then showed them the letter that was about to go out upon which appeared the names of the directors, headed by Ogden Armour, and consisting of all the Loop bank presi dents. After seeing this letter with the names of the directors listed thereon, they decided not to fight the Club and I told them that if they did not join the Club before they left the room not one of them would be allowed to step upon the grounds of the club so long as I lived which would be very detrimental to the social standings of their families.

They all joined and were very instrumental in passing an ordinance through the City Council trading the property

continued on page 5

South Shore - continued

owned by the City of Chicago located inside of the present fence for a forty-foot strip of land bordering the west side of the grounds from 67th Street to 71st Street. This particular strip was used for widening the present South Shore Drive to 60 feet from the old Bond Avenue 30 foot width. This also increased the ten foot grass plot bordering the club on the west side of the grounds to twenty feet.

The results from the second letter sent out were over one thousand acceptances for membership in the club, and in each letter of acceptance was enclosed a check for $100.00 as a initiation fee.

Thereupon we closed the real estate deal through Bert Winston who, at our request, showed his good fellowship by donating his commission of $7,000.00 as a fund to be used for promotional expense of the club.

We engaged Marshall and Fox as architects and copied a picture which I had in my possession of an old Mexican Club in the City of Mexico, leaving out th expensive embellishments shown in the picture.

The solarium of the club was originally developed from an open porch which was glassed in between the columns for protection from severe storms. This is how the beautiful solarium in both buildings originated.

The present ballroom is the original ballroom which was left in its present site when the new building was built. The acoustics of the ballroom were pronounced by Walter Damrosch and his orchestra as the best in America. In a comer of the ballroom, Mr. Damrosch played a high note on his violin which could be heard in any part of the ballroom and which he said was impossible in any auditorium in which he had played. This, of course, was just a lucky break in our favor.

We then started erecting the first South Shore Country Club. It was necessary to build it rapidly as we could not collect the club dues until we had the grounds and the building finished. Every member was called upon to donate his services, material and time towards the completion of the club.

Lawrence Heyworth

About this period the Washington Park Club closed. I told Lawrence Young, president of that club, that if he would give us the greens and the lockers of the Washington Park Club we would make him a director of the South Shore Club later on when a charter was taken out. He was another loyal fellow and sold us the greens and lockers of the Washington Park Club, which was considered the finest English turf a that time.

We paid I¢ per square yard for the greens and fifty cents each for the lockers. We then used delivery wagons from the Loop stores to haul all of these greens and lockers over to the grounds of the South Shore Country Club. This line up of wagons was a quarter of a mile long and consisted of wagons from Marshall Field, Mandel Brothers, the Fair Store, Montgomery Ward and many others, and with their help we succeeded in sodding the grounds in a few days.

The club house was finally finished within two and one half months. Mr. H. I. Miller, who was then president of the Rock Island Railroad and had rebuilt the Pennsylvania road through Johnstown in twenty-four hours after the famous Johnstown flood, was the fellow we persuaded to finish up the terraces. We told him that if he would put in all the sod, grass and trees around the club within seven days we would make him president of the Club the second year of its existence. He put in temporary railroad tracks and with gangs of men finished the entire grounds in six days and gave all this to the club as a donation.

Mr. Worcester, the Vice-President of the Peoples Gas Light and Coke Company, put in all of the lights and pipe lines for lighting up the grounds and building.

We opened up the club at the end of September, 1906, with a grand party which was a great success. The kitchen was not yet completed at that time and Mr. Southgate of the Congress Hotel and Mrs. Potter Palmer, owner of the Palmer House, sent out wagonloads of food, a manager and all necessary waiters and service for the opening party. It made a regular New Year's Eve celebration look like a tame affair.

October 1992 - 5

CORNELL AWARD WINNER, AFTER THE FIRE

by Margo Crisroula

On Dec. 22, 1989, Hyde Park almost lost an historic house. 1361 East 57th Street, the end of a handsome brick row of professors' townhouses (built in 1903 by Mann, MacNeille, and Lindberg), suffered a serious fire. Walls and floors in the rear half of the house on all three stories were destroyed. The tile roof was breached, the windows shat tered, stairwell and millwork on the first floor charred beyond use. The homeowners, Janet Burch and Joel Guillory, were left with a wreck that many homeowners would have consigned to destruction. Instead, they brought their house back to vibrant life.

A great part of their task was replacement. Burch, who considers herself a "detail maniac," found a congenial collaborator in Cerwe Construction Co., a small firm with expert craftsmen able to rebuild cabinetry, fireplaces, and doorways, replace the diamond paned windows in many custom sizes, and produce a variety of beautiful wall treatments. They rebuilt the livingroom fireplace as an exact copy of the original, and duplicated millwork from a neighboring house to create a perfect match between replacements and survivors of the fire.

The plentiful woodwork on the first floor was-and is-oak.

For the upper storeys, Burch and Guillory replaced bass wood with basswood, despite advisors who argued for more oak. ''Though it is cheaper, to me it has a wanner, softer look for the upstairs," Burch says. The new wood has been stained and varnished to make a meticulous match with the old. All the original door hardware was spared. The only major casualty was the built-in hutch in the dining room, which was not replaced. An antique open cupboard does very well instead-maybe better.

The couple seized many opportunities large and small to improve upon the original.

The staircase had always been a grievance. Though close to the entrance, it was a narrow switchback that exuded a backstairs aura and exercised a stringent veto over furniture for the second and third floors. It was replaced with a more commodious square stairwell, its millwork coped from a neighboring house, that makes a graceful entrance directly into the living room.

The new stairwell opened an inviting path to the kitchen, which also benefited from the fire. ''With the kitchen and bathroom, you don't want to go back to the past," Burch says. The kitchen gained space from the old butler's pantry, and lost its "nasty old linoleum," which Burch had not replaced only because she dreaded a disruptive kitchen renovation, to Mexican quarry and decorated tiles. The breakfast nook, an earlier add-on at the back of the house, was given an eastward window; its sunny view of the backyard garden, with deck and patio, could never be improved. Second- and third-floor bathrooms were given modem fixtures, space-saving showers, lots of mirrors and light. Yet the feel of the house was preserved here too, with richly decorative tile.

Most imaginative of the changes was the addition of a half-bath next to the kitchen. The wall and French doors

1361 E. 57th Street Photo by Ed Campbell

between living and dining rooms were replaced by a deep archway, a shape echoing exterior decoration on other houses in the block. One of the spaces became a tiny but most convenient powder room. On the other side, the paneling lining the archway conceals built in storage for china and linen. Adding even a small space seems a near miracle in a house only twenty-five feet wide, yet the dignity of the living and dining rooms was actually en hanced.

Finally, the overall floor plan was opened up. Originally, rooms had been small and chopped up with doors. "It was the klutziest house of the row, with doors in all the wrong places," according to Burch. Now, the separate tiny entranceway is gone. The second-floor study, which had been divided by an unnecessary wall and French doors, is now opened out into a single expanse, lined on three sides by built-in shelves and drawers and the original fireplace (a surprise survivor), and on the fourth by variously sized windows. (The architects of the block favored lots of windows in lots of sizes for a picturesque look that probably seemed quite luxurious in comparison with the standard sized windows, one per wall, common in cheaper homes of the period.) Among the windows is a pair of French doors; the former sleeping porch, itself a later addition, has been updated as a sunny open deck.

The finished house now looks good for another 90 years.

It offers some practical lessons for those of us faced with the less drastic damage inflicted on older homes by age and changing modes of life. Watch the details, have a clear picture of the lovable and the unlovable of what you have to work with. And remember that your house is not alone. It has a peer group-other houses in the row or up the block, in Hyde Park/Kenwood or, at farthest, somewhere in Chicago that can suggest materials, motifs, large plans or small particulars. With their help, your house can run with the old gang forever.

6 - October 1992

A TOUR OF PULLMAN

by Mary C. Lewis

A unique area of great significance to Chicago's past was the site of a tour sponsored by the Hyde Park Historical Society, August 8. Several Hyde Parkers traveled to Pullman on that summer Saturday and were led by a volunteer from the Historic Pullman Foundation, which conducts tours for groups.

The first stop on the tour was the headquarters of the Historic Pullman Foundation on 113th Street, founded in 1973 and housed in a former "block" or boarding house. The group was shown a 30 minute slide show which provided background information about the formation of Pullman.

In 1881, railroad company president George M. Pullman began his official plans for the town, with Solon Spencer Beman as architect and Nathan F. Barrett as landscape designer. One year later, the town's population had reached 3,500 and by 1885 the number of residents had almost tripled, to 9,000. In 1889, although the majority of Pullman's residents voted against the decision, the town was included with Hyde Park when annexation laws made Pullman part of Chicago.

Within five years, economic upheaval and labor union struggles caused Pullman to emerge in the national news. The Pullman Strike of 1894 and subsequent violence brought a veil of notoriety to Pullman, and although the town won an 1896 international prize as the "most perfect town," the area began a downward slide. Sixteen years after he founded the town, George Pullman died. In 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court ordered all non-industrial property in Pullman to be sold, effectively ending the company's control. During the early 1900s, many workers bought the houses that they had been renting from the Pullman Com pany and they continued to live in the area.

By 1960 only a few owner-occupied homes were still well maintained and Pullman was designated a blighted neighborhood. Community residents then spent several years successfully fighting efforts to tear down the area's buildings or construct what residents viewed as undesirable developments. The residents' efforts also resulted in triple landmark status: state (1969), national (1971), and city (1972). In 1991, the State of Illinois purchased Pullman's Administration Buildings and Hotel Florence for a proposed Pullman State Historic Site.

After the slide show, the group of Hyde Parkers were given a tour of the area. This began with an interior visit to one of the renovated row houses for sale in the neighbor hood. (The Historic Pullman Foundation provides free listings and an informational exchange for interested buyers and sellers.) The Hyde Park group then strolled the sur rounding blocks while the tour guide described the shifting ethnic makeup of the town. During the late 1800s, when Pullman's sleeping cars were constructed of wood, the workers and their families were mainly of Swedish and Danish descent; then around 1910 when steel became the required building material for the railroad cars, the town's ethnic makeup changed to those of Polish, Italian and Greek ancestry.

As the group continued walking, several kinds of residences were noticed: workmen's cottages, the foreman's house, which was always placed at a comer of a block; and the larger residences of the plant manager, bandmaster, and town manager.

Across from the town's church was another large residence, built in the 1890s and meant to house a doctor for the town. The red brick Quadrant Building, constructed for Pullman's special guests who attended the Columbian Exposition of 1893, stands across from the Market Hall (a shopping area and bakery) and now houses apartments.

The group's next stop was the town's Greenstone Church, constructed of green limestone from Pennsylvania. The church's first minister was George Pullman's brother. Among the church's noteworthy details were its antique Steere & Turner Tracker organ, which included a plaque from the National Organ Historical Society, and the lack of any denominational or religious symbols-due to George Pullman's desire that the building be non-denominational so that all residents would feel comfortable attending services.

The final stop on the tour was the Hotel Florence, named after George Pullmans's favorite daughter. On the second floor of the hotel are several items of historical interest.

George Pullman's personal suite has been preserved to show the bedroom and sitting room furniture he used whenever he stayed at the hotel, and several photographs show his residence in the Prairie Avenue District. Also on display on the second floor are another, smaller hotel room and some artifacts from a Pullman sleeping car.

The Hyde Park group then enjoyed a lunch in the hotel dining room, which gave us a chance to discuss the many items of interest which had been seen that afternoon.

October 1992 - 7

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February, 1993

Annexation- Just in Time for the Fair

by Richard C. Bjorklund

Had it been up to long-ago voters in Hyde Park and Kenwood, Chicago now would be a smaller city bounded by 39th Street (Pershing Road), Fullerton Avenue, Pulaski Road and Lake Michigan, girded by strongly independent suburban municipalities.

In June, 1889, Chicago grew to four times its size, from 41 to more than 167 square miles, through votes favoring an nexation with the city in the City of Lake View, Jefferson Township, the Town of Lake, part of the Town of Cicero and the Village of Hyde Park. By this annexation, Chicago took its place as America's "Second City" with a population in excess of I million, more than any metropolis except New York.

Tne Great Annexation of 1889 was the second time Chicago had attempted to broaden its territory and tax base by annexing the Village of Hyde Park which in I 887 "won and lost (being part of Chicago) through a legal technicality," according to the Chicago Tribune.

That "legal technicality" barring annexation was found by Melville Weston Fuller, a lawyer for George "Duke" Pullman, who was vigorously opposed to his company town

- within the confines of Hyde Park - becoming part of the City of Chicago. By 1889, Pullman's lawyer was Mr. Chief Justice Fuller, appointed by President Grover Cleveland to serve 21 undistinguished years on the nation's highest court.

In the 1889 annexation vote, voters in the Village of Hyde Park turned out in significant numbers as 8,368 men, two thirds those eligible, cast 5,207 votes for annexation and 3,151 votes against, giving annexation a plurality of 2,046.

Communities within the Village of Hyde Park that strong ly favored annexation included Hegewisch, Grand Crossing, employees of the Illinois Steel Company as well as Colehour and Cummings which, the Tribune noted, were recently "visited by destructive fues" and were therefore inclined to want better fire protection.

Kenwood, "the aristocratic residence district par excel lance of the village", according to the Tribune, voted to stay out, 287 to 146. Hyde Park, the seat of the village government, rejected the proposition by a vote of 598 to 277. A harbinger of today's "lakefront politics" could be found in the vote of Edgewater and Uptown which also rejected annexation.

There is a considerable irony in the rejection of annexation by Hyde Park and Kenwood because no area of Chicago immediately benefited more from the Great Annexation of 1889, called one of the four most significant dates in Chicago history by authors of "Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis."

Annexation was supported by civic and business interests in the city as well as by Chicago's newspapers because it was seen as a necessary prelude to the World's Columbian Ex position of 1893, the greatest civic achievement in the city's history, staged in Hyde Park on the Midway Plaisance.

Chicago wanted annexation to present to the world the image of a large and thriving urban area, one more expansive than the scant 41 square miles it had accumulated since incorporation in 1837. More than that, the city planned to float a $5 million general-obligation bond issue to support the creation of the Columbian Exposition; annexation would broaden the property-tax base.

continued on page 2

Annexation-continued from page I

Successive mayors Carter Harrison I, John Roche and Hempstead Washburne encouraged annexation, which was tried through the Cook County Board in 1887 and achieved through popular and City Council vote in 1889. Harrison was elected "World's Fair Mayor," only to suffer assassination at the hands of a disappointed job seeker only hours after he pronounced:

"Genius is but audacity, and the audacity of Chicago has chosen a star. It has looked upward to it, and knows nothing that it fears to attempt, and thus far has found nothing that it cannot accomplish."

Another annexation irony is found in the election of John Hopkins to succeed Harrison for the 1893-95 mayoral term. Hopkins, then an executive of Pullman Palace Car Co., op posed Hyde Park annexation in 1887 as an agent of his boss, George Pullman. But by 1889 as independent operator of Arcade Trading Co. in Pullman and Secord & Hopkins Co., a Kensington department store, he vigorously advocated an nexation. Hopkins, incidentally, was the first of many Irish Catholic mayors of Chicago.

George Pullman represented one strain of annexation foes whose chief objection to the proposal was that they would lose personal and political power in a merger with the city. There were, however, great numbers of sincere private citizens who had legitimate objections to the annexation proposal in Hyde Park and elsewhere. They feared bringing the vice and corruption of the central city to their suburban like communities where saloons, prostitution, shanties and, they believed, political corruption were unknown.

2 - February, 1993

So deep ran the mistrust for Chicago and its political works that Charles S. Bak.er, treasurer of the Village of Hyde Park, insisted that the village board adopt a declaration that read:

"Whereas, the treasurer of Hyde Park and the Town of Lake hesitate and delay to pay over to the City of Chicago the moneyirnheirposses-sion unless indemnifiei:I and other of ficers hesitate and delay to pay over the monies in their possession belonging to Chicago "

Chicago thereupon adopted an ordinance indemnifying Baker and others, leading to Annexation of the Village of Hyde Park, which became the 32nd Ward of Chicago from 39th to 55th Streets and the 33rd and 34th Wards south of 55th Street to the center line of State Street and east to Lake Michigan and State Line Road.

Citizens favoring annexation now looked forward to ful fillment of the promise of better municipal services, including water and sewerage, police protection and fire-department services. They also welcomed an end to petty rivalries among small, contentious units of government, including multiple school districts.

On July 15, 1889, Chicago added220,000citizens and 125 square miles of territory that became 34 of the city's present 50 wards and 53 of its 77 community areas. Forty-eight square miles of the new city land had been the Village of Hyde Park, which then contained the Chicago Jockey Club in Washington Park, South (now Jackson) Park that was soon to be the home of the World's Columbian Exposition, and Oak.woods Cemetery.

A meaningful footnote to the annexation of Hyde Park to the City of Chicago came on Saturday, July 15, 1939, when the Hyde Park Golden Jubilee Celebration was initiated in the Council Chambers of the City of Chicago to mark the 50th anniversary of annexation. Sponsor of the resolution for the jubilee was Ald. Paul H. Douglas (5th), who called attention to a community-wide celebration to be held from July 15 to

October 15 of 1939.

Lette'f from the Fair - 1893

John A. Campbell ( 1836-1909) of Butler, Indiana was a school teacher, insurance agent, diarist, writer, traveler, correspondent for the local weekly Courier. He kept a diary for over 50 years and wrote many newspaper columns about his journeys by train in the late 1800's. Ed Campbell is his grandson.

Ed Campbell is also treasurer of the Hyde Park Historical Society and a talented photographer whose exhibit "Struc tures in Hyde Park" is currently on display at Society Head quarters. The column below, written in /893 by Ed's grandfather, tells of his visit to the "Great Fair."

Your correspondent, intent on visiting the great Fair, failed to remember the COURIER last week and to make amends will indite this letter. We reached Chicago on the eve of the 16th of May and found no difficulty in obtaining good room and board at $1.50 per day. Wednesday we spent in visiting points of interest in the city and making business calls. Thursday we started early and reached the fair gates an hour too early. The delay seemed tedious, but it terminated, and we entered the enchanted place, and if not a building was open, one would be greatly benefited to see only the outside of the largest and most showy buildings to be seen in a group anywhere in the world. Our day was spent mainly in fixing bearings, studying the geography of the city and learning to distinguish one monster building from another, and after spending much time and indulging much thought, the enchantment of the place would frequently entangle us and we would be compelled to ask the aid of one of the two thousand gentlemanly guards for information. We started to visit the state buildings and commenced with Indiana, and, while she is bringing up the scattered, demoralized rear, yet, she has a very pretty building, neat without and within, still incomplete, but enough done to make a show of what it will be. One feature of the building is admirable--wide stairways of easy ascent and a long, wide portico that will shelter thousands of poor hot, tired Hoosiers in the near future. The fair would be a grand affair if one could change his weary legs and blistered feet for new ones about four times a day. This difficulty may be slightly modified at $7.50 per day by getting one of the 2,000 roller chairs and a stout wheelman to push it. Yet this is only an aggravation as somebody is always between you and what you want to see and moves only after you are tired waiting and have lost interest in something more

distant that you will perhaps get no further view of. So the only really satisfactory way is to tramp, tramp, until you are completely done for and then sit down and rest. The Nebras ka state building is an ornament to that great state, and its exhibit is worth a trip to Chicago. Washington comes in for a large share of praise for a unique building. One nowhere else of a similar form is found. It is built of huge pine and walnut logs about four feet in diameter and fifty feet long, surmounted by a frame structure of difficult description. Her exhibits are wonderful and perfect. The Dakotas have some what similar buildings and many rare exhibits. Idaho has a wonderfully old fashioned round log building large enough to entertain a half dozen corn husking bees. Pennsylvania comes in with an old fashioned frame house. Wide doors and windows with small lights of glass. Liberty bell is carefully enshrined within and thousands view it with wonder and awe. New York is outdoing herself and creating a palace of mag nificence nowhere else equaled. Her Public Hall is said to be unequaled anywhere for magnificence. No exhibit in the building to speak of. Florida has an odd shaped building in the form of a fort and is filled with the products of that sunny slope. The fish, turtle and sea products are so real that we smell fish for an hour after leaving her building. West Vir ginia, the Carolinas and some other states have small, un pretentious buildings, Kentucky being partially an exception. Well, my letter is outgrowing my intentions and I must draw it to a close and possibly resume the subject in the near future. The only trouble is, we can't tell it as it is, and the only way to realize the magnitude and grandeur of the Fair is to visit it.

May 20, 1893 J.A.C.

The Society plans to exhibit personal memorabilia of the Columbian Exposition beginning March 1. Loans of letters, articles, souvenirs and curiosities are invited from the com munity. All items will be acknowledged and returned at the close of the exhibit in November. Please bring items for the exhibit to the headquarters on Saturdays or Sundays between 2 and 4 pm.

February, 1993 - 3

Steve Treffma,n, our Society Archivist, shares a bit of history - unpleasant, but our history nonetheless - with us.

Notes from the Archives:

by Steve Treffman

Restrictive Covenants: The existence of race restrictive real estate covenants in Hyde Park during much of the second quarter of this century has received mention in several recent articles. In the December, 1991, issue of our Society's Newsletter, Leon M. Despres noted the importance these then legally enforceable agreements between property owners had in promoting racial segregation in Hyde Park. Margaret Fallers, in our June, 1992 issue, characterized these restrictive covenants as among the more shameful elements of Hyde Park history. Elsewhere, Stewart Winger, in the Spring/Sum mer 1992 issue of Chicago History, described in some detail the University of Chicago's role in support of the covenants.

To give some sense of the concrete reality of these covenants, excerpts are offered here from two documents of that era which are illustrative both of the actual language of these covenants and of some of the ways in which they were enforced. The first is dated February 24, 1932 and is a standard real estate property owner's agreement form presently in the archives of the United Church of Hyde Park. The agreement requires that any_transfer, lease or other arran gement regarding real estate covered by the covenant was to be subject to two binding qualifications:

1. The restriction that no part of said premises shall in any manner be used or occupied directly or indirectly by any negro (sic) or negroes, provided that this restriction shall not prevent the occupation, during the period of their employment, of janitors' or chauffeurs' quarters in the basement or in a barn or garage in the rear, or of servants' quarters by negro janitors, chauffeurs or house servants, respectively, actually employed as such for service in and about the premises by the rightful owner or occupant of said premises.

2. The restriction that no part of said premises shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes, and no permission or license to use or occupy any part thereof shall be given to any negro except house servants or janitors or chauffeurs employed thereon as aforesaid.

"Negro" was defined as:

every person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood or having any appreciable admixture of negro blood, and every person who is commonly known as a colored person.

Once signed by eighty percent of the owners of a block of contiguous properties, the form was then to be filed at the offices of the Cook County Recorder of Deeds or Registrar of Titles. It should be emphasized that this form was not unique to Hyde Park-Kenwood but was used throughout Chicago and, in similar formats, in other cities in the United States as well.

Community organizations were usually formed to promote and enforce the restrictive covenants. One such group, operating under the direction of a board made up of representatives of local real estate, banking and commercial interests, was the Hyde Park Property Owner's Association, Inc. with offices at 1548 E. 53rd Street. In November 1944, its executive director prepared a mimeographed two page "Special Report to Members," a copy of which now rests in our Society's archives. In this excerpt from that document, activities by the HPPO in support of the racial covenants were reported with pride:

1. In recent weeks this Association has investigated and eliminated the following incidents of Negro occupancy in Hyde Park.

(a) In a residence south of 55th Street and east of Wood lawn Avenue a Negro family occupied a basement apart ment for several weeks in violation of a property ownc-rs' agreement. The Association negotiated with the owner who caused the termination of the Negro tenancy. The property is now occupied by whites.

(b) In a rooming house south of 55th Street and east of University Avenue a room was rented to a white woman whose alleged husband was a Negro. These folks moved out subsequent to our investigation.

(c) A merchant on 55th Street rented the rear of his store for living purposes to a Negro woman. When this mer chant was advised that his action constituted a violation of the restrictive agreements, he caused the eviction of his tenant. This entire manner was adjusted within four days.

(d) the owner of a six apartment building near 53rd Street and west of Woodlawn Avenue contracted to sell her property through a Negro broker. She had been told that the purchaser was a Caucasian, but investigation by the Association disclosed that in fact the proposed purchaser was a Negro. The owner then authorized the Association to effect a cancellation of the sales contract ...

continued on page 5

4 - February, 1993

Archives - continued from page 4

(e) Another violation recently occurred in an apartment building on Hyde Park Boulevard. The situation was satis factorily adjusted after a discussion with the owner there of."

Ironically, the successes the HPPO executive claimed may have been as much signs of weakness as of strength. Obvious ly, some landlords, whatever their motives, were presenting challenges to the restrictive covenants. Moreover, a sig nificant portion of the community's white population had begun to express fundamental repugnance towards the covenant's racially discriminatory premise. Ultimately, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 overturned legal enforcement of the covenants. With the onset of Hyde Park's post-war urban renewal, individuals rose to prominence who would become symbols of new community attitudes com mitted to racial fairness. These men and women became leaders in the renewal process, with Mr. Despre's an obvious, though by no means singular, example, and, whether through political careers or roles in a variety of public and private institutions, they helped shape what would be a new era in Hyde Park history.

Studies of these periods in Hyde Park history will, no doubt, continue to be written. There are probably many readers of our newsletter who have memories of personal experiences or who have reports or other documents related to the eras of the religious and racially restrictive covenants or of urban renewal in the Hyde Park area. If you would like to share those memories or relevant documents, our Society would be eager to have them in our archives and available to future researchers.

For further reading: Julia Abramson, A Neighborhood Finds Itself (Chicago, 1959); Robert J. Blakely, "Earl B. Dickerson and Hyde Park," HPHS Newsletter, December 1986; St. Clair Drake and Howard R. Cayton, Black Metropolis (Chicago, 1945); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, 1983); Herman H. Long and Charles Johnson, People vs. Property: Race Restrictive Covenants in Housing (Nashville, 1947); Thomas L. Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago 1880-1930 (New York, 1978); Clement E. Vose, Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases (Berkeley, 1967); Robert

C. Weaver, The Negro Ghetto (New York, 1948); and Stewart Winger, "Unwelcome Neighbors," Chicago History Spring/Summer 1992, pp. 56-72.

Lia Treffman, Carol Bradford and Theresa McDermott provided research assistance in the preparation of this ar ticle.

February, 1993 - 5

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Work and his wife and their two children resided in the house until its sale to Guy Sampson in 1867. Sampson, who

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THE WORK COTTAGE

The Chicago Landmarks Commission has decided against designating the Henry C. Work Cottage as a landmark partly because of its inaccessibility and partly because of the objec tions of the owner. However, the Commission has provided an interesting history of the house and its builder. We quote below some of their findings. If you would like to read the entire report, you can find it at HPHS headquarters.

The cottage at the rear of 5317 Dorchester Avenue was built by Henry Work in either 1859 or '60 and occupied by him and his family during the years of his principal songwrit ing significance. In 1859, Work bought the property at 5317 Dorchester from the original subdividers, Paul Cornell and Hassan A. Hopkins, Cornell's uncle. His move to Hyde Park is corroborated by an 1859-60 directory as well as 1860 census data.

Residential settlement proceeded steadily during the '50s as Cornell began selling lots in the area bounded by 51st and 55th streets, Dorchester Avenue and the lake. As noted by Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett in Chicago, City of Neigh borhoods, "Hyde Park began to take on the characteristics of a small New England town, reflecting the background of most of its early residents." The character of the town was rein forced by its institutions, the First Presbyterian Church of Hyde Park being principal among them at the time. The congregation was organized in 1858, and built their first church at 53rd Street and Hyde Park Boulevard. Henry Work and his wife were among the organizers of the congregation. Work was also elected township clerk in 1864 and served two years.

TheWork Cottage is an example of the Carpenter's Gothic style. Characteristic features of the style visible on the Work House are the vertical board and batten siding and the steep roof pitch, both of which combine to give the design a strong vertical emphasis. The style also generally utilized pointed arch detailing, a shape seen in the window opening of the roof dormer on the north elevation.

6 - February, /993

was sold again after the death of Sampson in 1878, and by then, according to John Drury in Old Chicago Houses, the home of one of America's most important composers had been cast into oblivion. The obscurity of the house belies its importance to its community and to the nation.

HENRY WORK, SONGWRITER

The abolitionist cause that Henry Work championed in song came naturally. Work was born in Middletown, Con necticut in 1832, the son of Alanson and Aurelia Work. His father was a militant abolitionist who, in 1835, moved his family to Quincy, Illinois, where the family's home became a station on the Underground Railroad. Though radical in his actions against slavery, Alanson Work's abolitionist feelings were not uncommon during the early-to-mid-nineteenth cen tury. The slavery issue was a persistent thorn in the side of American life from the time of the United States' inde pendence and as the nation matured, popular sentiment grew to eradicate the institution. Approximately 4,000 slaves es caped from Missouri through the Work homestead in Quincy. The elder Work was eventually tried and convicted by the State of Missouri for his a tivities. With the father's release from prison in 1845, the family returned to Middletown.

Henry Work received a standard education including study of Greek and Latin...through his studies Work also became familiar with musical notation. Musical composition proved a preoccupation as he wrote lyrics and melodies for his own satisfaction. By the time he was fourteen, however, Work's parents began to steer their son toward the more practical pursuit of learning a trade. Rejecting the tailoring profession suggested by his parents, Work found printing more suitable to his tastes, and in later years commented that whatever success he had achieved as a songwriter were attributable to the disciplines of the print trade.

At the same time Work was pursuing his printing career, he continued to teach himself music. The first recognition of Work's musical talents came in 1853 when Edwin P. Christ, of the Christy Minstrels, agreed to sing Work's We are Coming, Sister Mary at his concerts. Publication of the song gave Work more incentive to continue his song writing. Work was discouraged by his subsequent compositions and, by 1857 when he came to Chicago, he still regarded himself primarily as a printer.

The Civil War was a turning point in Work's songwriting efforts. The conflict and its nascent themes of patriotism and abolition apparently gave Work a focus for his songs which was not present before. In 1861, he wrote Brave Boys Are They, the first of a remarkable series of war songs. The song was bought by the Chicago music firm of Root & Cady and led to a contract for Work with that music publisher.

continued on page 7

Work- continued from page 6

During the war years, Work produced a series of inspira tional songs, including Kingdom Coming (1861), Grafted into the Army (1862), Babylon is Fallen (1863), Wake, Nicodemus (1864), and Marching Through Georgia (1865). Often the songs reflected the events and mood of the war, such as the somber tone of Song of Thousand Years (1863) revealing the prevailing pessimism of the Union following Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania. The songs were enormously popular.

Within seven months of its publication, Kingdom Coming had sold more than 20,000 copies, but, more significantly, reports were heard that within weeks of the song's printing, Kingdom Coming was being sung as an inspirational verse by slaves behind the Confederate lines.

The popularity of his partisan songs notwithstanding, Work's best remembered song of the period is probably the temperance ballad Come Home, Father (1864). Often recog nized by its opening line, "Father, dear father, come home with me now," the song is unrelenting in its pathos-so much so that Root & Cady offered free copies of the sheet music to anyone who could read it without weeping.

Work continued to write songs for Root & Cady through 1870, though he left Chicago, presumably in 1867 when he sold his house in Hyde Park. With the close of the Civil War, Work's composing career floundered. For the most part, his post-War songs were ordinary in subject sometimes fell into the vapid melodramatic tones common to many songs of the period. His apparent frustration with the public response o his songs is suggested by the fact that between 1867 and his death in 1884, Work wrote a little more than half the number of melodies he had composed from 1861 to 1866.

The simple ballad evidenced the best features of Work's songs, as noted by a contemporary critic:

His melodies are simple and natural but as unlike and varied as the emotions to which they give expression; but, whether grave or comic, they possess inspirational qualities that, as musical compositions, arouse the im agination and fasten themselves upon the memory of the hearer. In his songs, Mr. Work is distinguished by his use of plain Anglo-Saxon words. He discards frothy adjectives, all rant, all extravagance of lan guage, and like Dickens, relies upon the situation he creates. This is the source of his power over the human heart.

Though he continued to compose songs, none of them equalled the public regard of Grandfather's Clock or hi Ci il War melodies. Henry Work died in Hartford, Connecticut 111 1884, a tragic figure who had never been able to regain his audience.

REFLECTIONS

by Carol Bradford, Outgoing President, HPHS

Reflecting on my two-year term as president of this Society, I am impressed most of all by the dedicated efforts of so many of our board members.

Theresa McDermott continues to produce a wonderful newsletter with the help of our members who contribute lively and fascinating articles of historic interest.

Our exhibits included one by our own Ed Campbell, on the structures in Jackson Park. Anita Weinberg Miller presented her exhibit on Clarence Darrow, with an opening program by her mother, Lila Weinberg, Darrow's biographer. Other programs done by our own members were Margo Criscoula' s presentation of the life and early music of Hen y Clay Work, Leon Despres' recollections of his early years 111 Hyde Park, and a program by Zeus Preckwinkle in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Harvard School.

We took a tour of Riverside, Illinois in August '91, or ganized by Mary Lewis; and in August '92 to Pullman, planned by Zeus. . .

We have devoted more attention to our archives 111 these

years, under the supervision of Steve Treffman. Some of our more interesting acquisitions are a golden anniversary book of the South Shore Country Club, and the great photo collec tion of Charles Bloom. The board voted to earmark funds donated by the Jean Block family for the purchase of materials to be preserved in the archives. The past two years, we devoted our August board meeting to preservation of our own organization records. This job is not yet complete, but we have made a substantial beginning.

We are especially grateful to the members of LILAC (Landscaping Initiative for the LakePark Avenue Corridor) for their work to beautify the railroad embankment south of our building. The Society contributed to this project by in stalling outdoor faucets to assure that the plants could be watered as needed. I'm sure all of you appreciated the im provement in the appearance of our block last summer and fall.

Finally, our society was the recipient of a generous bequest of $2,000 from the estate of Carol Goldstein. Ms. Goldstein was a regular volunteer at our headquarters for several years before ill health made it necessary for her to retire.

As I leave office, I want to encourage our members to become personally involved in activities of the Society. Alta Blakely is always in need of volunteers at the headquarters. Other ways to help include the newsletter production, pro gram, exhibits, and membership committees. Please let our new president know how you would like to help.

It has been an honor to serve as president of the Society.

Thanks to each of you for your continued support.

February, 1993 - 7

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Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Sat. 2-4 PM; Sun. 2-4 PM

October, 1993

The White City As It Was Current Exhibit at Society Headquarters

by Ed Campbell

If you have ever wondered how the Columbian Exposi tion of 1893 was laid out in Jackson Park, this exhibit of W.

H. Jackson's photographs of the Fair will give you a con cept of the grand ensemble as well as detailed views of the important buildings. Arranged in a sequence around Wooded Island, the 26 large format photographs establish relationships and furnish vistas of the impressive sweep of the classical facades in the setting of lagoons and formal canals and basins.

Beginning at the Administration Building (south west corner of the fair) the buildings of the Court of Honor are displayed: Machinery, Agriculture, the Watergate, Manufac turers and Liberal Arts, Electricity and Mines. North from here and west of Wooded Island are Transportation, the Choral Building, Horticulture, and the Woman's Building. At the r.orth end are the Palace of Fine Arts and State Build ings. South east are the Fisheries and the U.S. Gove,mment Buildings. Buildings of foreign countries are along the lakefront between 57th and 59th streets, except for Japan which has buildings on the north end of Wooded Island.

The circuit of the structures surrounding Wooded Island is completed at the colossal Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building which extended 1687 feet north from the Court of Honor to the mid-point of the lagoon east of Wooded Is land. West of Stony Island, extending to Cottage Grove and between 59th and 60th Streets, was the Midway Plaisance which provided the setting for ethnic entertainment and the famous Ferris Wheel.

This overview establishes the space and location of the buildings. You are encouraged, however, to stop along your tour to read the notes regarding the structures which were provided by co-curator and archivist, Stephen Treffman. Be sides being extremely informative, the comments reflect keen insights from the contemporary point of view.

To supplement the exhibit of photographs, a collection of fascinating memorabilia is being shown: postcards of other buildings in Chicago a the time of the Fair, guidebooks to the Fair, and many other souvenirs. One curiosity is a "passport" with a photograph of the owner and dated coupons for each day the Fair was scheduled to be open.

We are grateful to Sam Hair for sending us another of his mother's delightful reminiscences ...

A Memoir Of Florence Cummings Hair

Compiled by Samuel Cummings Hair

The World's Columbian Exposition was planned for Chicago, to open on the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, 1492. But it proved to be so tremen dous an undertaking, it could not be completed until the spring of '93. It was the most colossal fair ever seen, up to then, and I think it has never been equalled in beauty. It was actually a World's Fair with all countries represented.

Father & Mother went to the grand opening and, the follow ing week father took me to Chicago with him.

After a visit to the Board of Trade (the noisiest place I had ever been) we took the Ill. Central to Hyde Park and passed thro' one of the many entrances to the Fair. I was ten years old. I have never forgotten that first sight of the Fair. A high fence surrounded the exhibit grounds and complete ly hid from sight any part of the grandeur within and as soon as we had passed thro the tum-style father stopped me, put his arms on my shoulders from behind and said, "Let's just look for a moment."

I have no words to describe the miles of curving streets, the beautiful lagoons, or the magnificent classical buildings

-- all white, and elaborate. The "Court of Honor", with the gold statue of Liberty and the Peristyle were unforgettable.

The state buildings were many of them remarkable. Illinois had a particularly fine one and I was one of those deeply im pressed with a huge "picture" landscape made from com kernels: a mosaic I think of colored kernels.

I went to the fair ten times before it closed but, to me, it is remembered as one of the most uncomfortable summers ever endured. We had, in Clifton, over 60 house guests - mostly father's relatives, mother would tell you! Marston was a year old, we had no rain for 102 days, the cistern went dry (due partly to careless use of water by our guests) and we were forced to use the water from one artesian well which was "hard" and utterly improper for use for washing. The guests found that it was less expensive to sleep in Clif

ton and commute to the Fair on a cd'mmutation railroad tick et -- a very low rate being in force. So we were flooded

with Fowler relatives and mother put in an awful summer. Irene and I were, of course, turned out of our bedroom and had to sleep in the small store-room above the kitchen (later the bathroom). This had one small west window. It was at the head of the back stairs where the kitchen heat was fun nelled up most successfully and the room never cooled off. That rainless summer was a great worry for father. Crops burned up and he had many "headaches".

October, 1993 - page 2

The Woman's Building designed by Sophia Hayden

NOTES FROM THE ARCHIVES

by Stephen A. Trejfman Archivist to the Society

This summer the Hyde Park Historical Society has been celebrating the 100th anniversary of the World's Colum bian Exposition with an exhibition entitled "The White City As It Was." Curated by HPHS Board members Edward Campbell and Stephen Treffman, the exhibit features twen ty-six large format half-tone panoramic views of the fair selected from a set of eighty taken by the famed American landscape photographer William Henry Jackson (1843- 1942). Also on display at our headquarters are souvenirs of the fair and other related items.

Our Society is one of over fifty different institutions in the Chicago Metropolitan area which have joined in this centenary celebration through the presentation of a variety of programs and exhibits.1

Exhibits on Columbian Exposition themes, each varying in perspective, have been offered this year by such institu tions as the Chicago Historical Society, the Art Institute, the Harold Washington Library, the Terra Museum of

American Art, the Museum of Science and Industry, Glessner House, the Regenstein Library, the School of So cial Service Administration of The University of Chicago, the DuSable Museum of African American History and even Chicago's City Hall. Paralleling the experiences of these and other exhibits in the city, ours has been attracting large numbers of visitors. In response, the Board has decided to extend it through Sunday, November 28, 1993, one hundred years and a day after the fair, which had hosted over 27 million visitors, finally closed its doors.

The plan of our exhibit is to present the viewer with a sense of the overall layout of the exposition's fairgrounds. At the center of the exhibit is a map of Chicago published in 1890 that shows not only the city's new boundaries after annexation of Hyde Park Village but also the outline of the exposition's fairgrounds as they were first conceived and, with but one alteration, actually laid out. The Jackson prints are arranged in a manner suggestive of a walk through the fair from the Administration Building just east of the fair's main entrance at approximately 63rd Street and Stony Is land and, following a route north past the exposition's major buildings, arriving at the far edge of the fairgrounds at 56th Street between Stony Island and the lake. It ends by returning to the point where the "walk" began. To facilitate the process a map of the exposition and an exhibit guide have been prepared and are available to visitors at no cost.

Lunch Box -

Lunch at the Fair, Harver"s. August 26, 1893

The prints themselves hold significance beyond their subjects. Jackson and C.D. Arnold each have been charac terized as the exposition's official photographer. The con fusion arises out of a set of circumstances that developed during the exposition itself. C.D. Arnold, in fact, was desig nated as "official photographer" by the Fair's Board of Directors and given the exclusive right to produce a range of photographic souvenirs of the fair. During that summer, however, a dispute arose between Arnold and the Board, ap parently over the copyrights to his photographs. This led

the Fair's chief administrator, Daniel H. Burnham, to con tract with Jackson to produce a series of one hundred eleven-by-fourteen-inch negatives for a fee of $1000. The Board, however, chose not to use the prints and negatives

that Jackson produced and turned them over to Arnold, who destroyed them. Fortuitously, Jackson had made a duplicate set of the negatives and, for another$1000, sold the rights to them to the White City Art Publishing Company. The publishing company then offered retouched half-toned reproductions of eighty of the prints to the public, either as complete books or by subscription wherein small portfolios of the prints were sent periodically by mail to subscribers'

homes at a total cost of $4.00. The series was entitled initial ly The White City (As it Was) (1894) and later as Jackson"s Famous Pictures of the World"s Fair (1895).2

continued on page 4 October. 1993 - page 3

,f..J,

,-.

Archives - continued from page 3

The White City Art Company was very aggressive in promoting the sale of Jackson's series and their efforts were well received. As a result, Jackson's views of the exposi tion had wide public exposure and prominence not only in the years after the fair but also well into this century. Col lections of half-tone prints by Arnold and other photog raphers were also published but those by Jackson "swept the market. "3 The nature of the views, the quality of the processes employed in producing the half-tone reproduc tions and the marketing of the results apparently made the difference. Arnold also produced memorable images of the Fair, but the larger body of his work and his reputation have tended to be eclipsed, perhaps unfairly, by other 19th Cen tury American photographers, including Jack on. For ex ample, a recent encyclopedia of photographers' biographies

contains a long entry on Jackson, referring to him as the "of ficial photographer of the Fair," but makes no reference at all to C.D. Arnold anywhere in the book.4 Two Arnold "real" photographs of scenes from the Fair that probably were available for sale to Fairgoers are presently on display at Regenstein library. Arnold's rare platinum print photographs of the Fair's construction were displayed at an exhibit which closed at the Art Institute earlier this summer.

Public exhibitions of this large a selection of the Jackson exposition prints are unusual and, in Chicago this anniver sary year, our Society's exhibit appears to be unique. Al though the half-tone prints are not rare, through the years many complete sets have been broken up and sold off in dividually by dealers. The actual photographic prints that Jackson produced and which were the basis for the prints in our exhibit, are, however, extremely rare. Archivists at the Chicago Historical Society, which has twelve photographs from the original Jackson series in its collection, have reported that the only complete set of which they are aware is in the Library of Congress. Moreover, the twelve CHS photographs now housed in their archives are, in a sense, dying, their sepia images graduaJly fading and losing detail.

The images in the half-tone reproductions of the Jackson prints, on the other hand, have generally remained sharp and fresh, although the paper on which they are printed has become rather fragile. Chicago's R.R. Donnelly and Sons' Lakeside Press, according to that company's archivist, printed the series by means of a process called

"planogravure" and used a heavy paper that held the ink par ticularly well. The photomechanical reprints of Jackson's work, then, have actually extended their useful lives and given them a popular recognition they might not otherwise have been accorded had they remained only as photographs.

Half-tone black and white reproduction methods and color lithographic processes dramatically affected the way in which the works of Jackson and other photographers and artists were made available to the public in the 1890s. Im-

October, 1993 - page 4

proved half-tone black and white mechanical printing proce dures had made mass production of photographic images

far more accessible and affordable to consumers eager for these products. As a result, there was considerable competi tion among publishers to meet the demand for pictures of the fair.5 One recent bibliography of World's Columbian Exposition printed material contains entries for 167 view books or portfolios of views focussing on the fair that were produced during and after it closed.6

Visitors to our exhibit may see examples of works by other photographers which appeared in Shepp's World's Fair Photographed (Chicago, 1893) and in The Dream City (St. Louis, 1894) both of which were distributed to the public in the same manner as were Jackson's, that is, as separate subscription folios or bound volumes. The strides made in half-tone techniques were matched and even sur passed by those in color lithography. Examples of such progress are evident in some exposition views from Daniel

H. Bumham's The Book of the Builders (Chicago, 1894)

which are on permanent display at our headquarters but have particular relevance during this exhibit. Technology and demand, it would seem, were feeding upon one another. All of the prints in our exhibit, then, not only helped capture images of the Fair but were, in themselves, symbols of the technological progress that the Fair itself was celebrating.

To an extent unparalleled for any Fair in this country's history up to that time and perhaps since, a flood of Colum bian Exposition souvenirs was produced for public con sumption. Included were such things as banks, fans, jewelry, historical glass, silk ribbons, tape measures, paper weights, watches, wooden pieces, knives, locks, corkscrews, and toys and the list goes on. An estimated one thousand varieties of souvenir spoons were cast, as well as two thousand different commemorative tokens and medals.

As for books and printed paper items from the Fair, there are over 2400 entries included in the Dybwad and Bliss bib liography and a supplement is in preparation. All in all, there may be as many as eighty distinct categories of memorabilia from the Exposition, each with subcategories.

We are fortunate to be able to present a manageable number of these souvenirs for display at our headquarters: a miniature ruby red pitcher, a milk glass commemorative dish, a metal box, a worker's ticket pass, a metal paper weight, an embroidered handkerchief and, of course, a variety of printed items, including an advertising map, a guide book, and some colorful postcards. Reproductions of six admission tickets to the Fair as well as the first set of legally sanctioned picture postcards in the United States, is sued in 1893 to honor the Exposition, are on display and are available for sale to the public at our headquarters.

continued on page 5

Five-cent Restaurant at the Fair,

Harper's, August 26, 1893

Archives - continued from page 4

The World's Columbian Exposition had an enormous im pact on Hyde Park and some of its neighboring com munities as well. If nothing else, it hastened Hyde Park's transformation from a village to a part of Chicago's urban landscape. While the Museum of Science and Industry is often noted as the last building still standing from the Fair, the remnants of the now truncated Jackson Park elevated line, the Alley "L," built in anticipation of the Fair and which carried many thousands of visitors to the 63rd Street

entrance to the exposition, also remains. Most of its parts date back to 1893. That track helped accelerate the growth of Chicago's South Side. Another line of access to the fair, the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, were elevated and the now familiar overpasses were first constructed in order to allow the safe entry of visitors to the Fair.

Then, there is The University of Chicago, built on land donated by one of the promoters of the Fair, Marshall Field. In 1894, Field would fund a natural history collection in the old Palace of Fine Arts, thus establishing the Field Colum bian Museum, which in 1920 transferred its collection to its new home in Grant Park and became the Field Museum of Natural History. Civic boosters and builders were aware that the Exposition would be built near and simultaneously with the University's campus. The juxtaposition of the two would demonstrate yet another significant cultural mile stone in a city risen from the bitter ashes of 1871. The University, in turn, would anchor, support and accelerate the process of community growth and development which the exposition had helped to spark.

The Society expresses its gratitude to Beverly Allen for her generous and timely contribution of a complete set of the William Henry Jackson prints to our archives. We are

grateful as well to Joe Clark from Art Werks of Hyde Park for his gift of the 1890 map of Chicago and to Leon and Marian Despres for their donation of the book, The Dream City, to the Society and to our exhibit. We wish to thank Eleanor Campbell, Margaret Modelung, Marshall Patner, and Harriet Rylaarsdam for the color and richness they brought to our exhibit through their loan of Columbian Ex position related items to the Society. A grant from the Jean Block Archival Fund assisted in the underwriting of this ex hibit.

Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago '93 (Chicago, 1993).

2 Peter B. Hales, William Henry Jackson and the Transfor mation of the American Landscape, (Philadelphia, 1988), pp.202-209.

3 Ibid., p. 209.

4 Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists and Innovators, (New York, 1983).

5 A review of this competition is expected next year with the publication by the University of Arizona Press of Julie K. Brown's book, Contesting Images: Photography and the World's Columbian Exposition.

6 G. L. Dybwad and Joy V. Bliss, Annotated Bibliog raphy: World's Columbian Exposition. Chica o. 1893, (Albuquerque: The Book Stops here, Publishers, 1992).

Ocrober, 1993 - page 5

Our sincere thanks to HPHS Board Member Jim Stronks who found these wonderful word-pictures and most of the drawings in the century-old magazines indicated.

Preliminary Glimpses of the Fair

from Century Magazine-February, 1893

"Great is Staff"

Many of the smaller structures would be notable for beauty and for size if they were not here made pygmies by continuous grandeur. Like the larger buildings they were veneered with "staff." Great is "staff'! Without staff this free-hand sketch of what the world might have in solid ar chitecture, if it were rich enough, would not have been pos sible. With staff at his command, Nero could have afforded to fiddle at a fire at least once a year. One of the wonders of staff as seen at Chicago is its color. Grayish-white is its natural tone, and the basis of its success at Jackson park; but it will take any tint that one chooses to apply, and main tain a Ii veliness akin to the soft bloom of the human skin.

Staff is an expedient borrowed from the Latin countries and much cultivated in South America. Any child skilled i

the mechanism of a mud pie can make it, after being provided with the gelatine molds and a water mixture of ce ment and plaster. How the workman appeared to enjoy seiz ing handfuls of excelsior or fiber, dipping them in the mixture and then sloshing the fibrous mush over the surface of the mold. When the staff has hardened, the resultant cast is definite, light and attractive. A workman may walk to his job with a square yard of the side of a marble palace under each arm and a Corinthian capital in each hand. While it is a little green it may be easily sawed and chiseled, and nails are used as in pine. Moreover rough joints are no objection, since a little wet plaster serves to weld the pieces into a finished surface.

In the rough climate of Lake Michigan staff is expected to last about six years, which the average life of the ablest English ministry. Great is taff!

HARPER'S WEEKLY

GOING TO WORK m mx MORNJNG.

Fairworkers heading toward East Hyde Park Harver's. April, 1893

October, 1993 - page 6

•..,:'=--;-t;-;-, c

. - --

:....

A Dream City

Excerpts from Harper's Monthly-May 1893

"Getting There'

... one may reach the fair by land or by water, starting from Van Buren Street Station by steam-launch or steam boat, or by steam-cars which are part of the grimy equip ment of the Illinois Central Railroad. If by boat, and the day is fair and mild, it is a journey of the blessed, and the liquid course seems made to waft one gently toward the celestial city.

That mortal, favored of the gods, who falls upon a lucky day to travel this opal road, may easily fancy himself gliding along the curves of a rainbow. He will be convoyed by flocks of wide-winged_creatures--swans of boats, and ducks of boats, and tropical birds of boats, whose white-winged and red-winged sails drag long trails of reflected color, or throw it of in palpitating flakes upon the gold and blue of baby waves over which he sails. Whoever, tired of the flat ness of daily life, wishes to experience a vision of color which will re-create for him the floating hours of Venice, or the sapphire days of Capri, may have it in completeness by making this voyage on a heavenly appointed day, from earthly Chicago to the celestial city.

But, if heaven fails to keep the appointment, and the un conscious and unhappy mortal holds to it, then, alas! hades opens before him; blackness is over him, darkness surrounds him. If he escapes with his life, he forever eschews the shin ing path to which heaven has lent color, and which canny Chicagoans have embellished with crimson sails and fairy floats, and he travels henceforth with mundane creatures on the rails of the Michigan Central.

Across from the Auditorium -

fining-up for a boat trip to the Fair.

Harper's. Summer 1893

Yet it is will for once to take the celestial waterway, since it brings one in an artfully heightened and beatific mood to the culmination of beauty which awaits him. He comes to it, sailing in sight of a granite-lipped shore, backed by gray-leaved and brown-barked willows, over which gold en and crystal domes are soaring. He floats into a pile protected yacht haven which may be alive with craft of all nations, and finds himself under the shadow of the great peristyle, and within the calm regard of the majestic statue of the Republic, which towers in beauty between land and sea. And under that dominating presence he enters at once into an enchanted land.

But to the traveller who seeks the fair by way of "The Central" there comes a different experience. He is but a private in the marching army. The great corporation of the road, foreseeing him and his kind, has been for months preparing a highway for him. For months it has been send ing laboring trains far out on the lake shore to dig and bring in carloads and acres and miles of sand, wherewith to build, high above the streets which border and pierce it, a con tinuous levee, broader than the walls of Babylon, whereon six chariots and their horses were driven abreast. It has for months, almost beyond the memory of troubled and hardly acquiescent Chicago, made of the lake shore a Sahara of sand, ready at any moment to join the lake winds in creating a simoom of suffocation and distress.

But the highway is, at the period of this writing, ap proximately made, and thereon numberless tracks lie side by side, and the world army will soon be marching over it. ..

October. 1993 - page 7

Century Magazine

May, 1892

Hyde Park

Historical Socie

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

March, 1994

Harper's Weekly, April 5, 1862

All the Dead Young Men: Camp Douglas and Oak Woods Cemetery

l,y Jim Stronks

We arc vny grateji,l to Jim, HPHS Board Member,jormer English Professor, and great History Rmarrherjor this though!ful rejlection 011 earlier years and wars.

Mass graves arc always dr::nnatic. One of the world's biggest is in our neighborhood, where 4357 Confederate soldiers lie, without headstones, under the silent grass at Oak Woods Cemetery. Alive, the 4357 would make up J small army themselves, but they died one-by-one at Camp Douglas, the union army's Civil War prison on the lakefront between 31st and 33rd Streets.

Our bird's-eye picture of the camp from Harper's Weekly in 1862 is fairly accurate. The view is southward, toward Hyde Park, with Lake Michigan on the left and suburban pr;:iirie all around. Camp Dougbs was both an induction center, where some 30,000 recruits were sworn in, and, walled off separate from it, a military prison holding from 500 to 12,000 POWs at any one time.

The first large contingent of Confederates at Camp Douglas were surrendered at the battle of Fort Donelson on February 16, 1862, after three days of assault in bit ter weather by a force under Ulysses S. Grant. When the CSA commander, with the romantic cantinuedanpage2

continued from page 1 name of Simon Bolivar Buckner, asked for terms, Grant's curt reply was "unconditional surren der," giving new meaning to his initials. Buckner, calling the terms "ungenerous and unchivalrous," which may reveal a faulty mind-set in what was a modern war, sur rendered his 13,000 to 15,000 hungry, half-frozen men at once. Grant hustled them aboard boats on the Cumberland River and sent them down to Cairo, Illinois, where 4500 were sent on to Chicago, many on the Illinois Central. Rolling through Hyde Park on Thursday, February 20th, they unloaded at the Central Station yards and were marched two miles through the streets to Camp Douglas, 3200 arriving on the 20th and

:mother 1259 on the 21st, for a total of 4459. Prison camps were often not prepared for an influx on this scale, and neither were the banacks at Can;ip Douglas.

I will speak of this first large group in some detail, as typical of others, but with the caveat that prison camp statistics and dates arc highly unreliable. The best sources disagree with each other in details, and some times even with themselves, so my numbers will be edu cated approximations. I also suspect from my reading of the day-by-day Tribune coverage of "Affairs at Camp Douglas" (always on page 4, column 2) that it too must be taken with a grain of salt, for its tone and coloring

appear to me to be slanted in favor of the camp's admin istrators. It figures.

Chicagoans were thrilled by Fort Donelson, the first major victory for the North, and the Tribune said the camp was "besieged by thousands of citizens, anxious to obtain a sight of the secessionists." Visitors could ride the horsecar to 32nd Street ( the stop there was called Cottage Grove), and if they could not wangle entree into the camp itself, as many did in the first days, could pay I O\t to look over the fence from a tower atop the hotel opposite the main entrance (discernible in our bird's-eye view).

A Tribune reporter who did get in to mingle with the prisoners found them "haggard and war-worn" and still hungry and cold. The sickest had gone into the camp hospital, but the merely sick lay in the crowded barracks, infecting others. Some Mississippians and "sharp-shoot c-rs from Central Texas" were "pale and actually had attacks of ague chills" (malaria) as they stood shivering

:imid the alien snow in the prison yard. "It may have been from exposure and low diet," said the Tribune, "but they were all sallow-faced, sunken-eyed, and apparently famishing." Their lightweight southern uniforms were "just no uniforms :it all." Few had overcoats-this in a Chicago February-and "supply their pbcc with horse blanket , pieces of carpet, coffee sacks, etc." (See our sketch of "Rebel Prisoners.") Undoubtedly, many of the Confederates who would die in Camp Douglas were in poor condition when they arrived.

"Rebel Prisoners at Camp Douglas, Chicago, Illinois."

Harper's Weekly, April 5, 1862

M a r c h I 9 9 4

Camp Douglas, group photo of Confederate prisoners

It hardly need be added that there were no hot show ers and blow dryers. There was exactly one cold-water hydrant for the whole 7000 men in camp at this time, and observers invariably said the men were "crawling with vermin." Scurvy (vitamin C deficiency), diarrhea, and influenza were everywhere. Pneumonia, dysentery, typhus, cholera, and smallpox, not all at the same time,

were common. In the camp hospital, no matter how

well-intended, the medical science was that of I 862. The results were inevitable. In seven months, February to September, 800 southern soldiers died at Camp Douglas.

In April 1862 a new trainload of POW s had aJTived from Shiloh, among chem a 21-year-old who had enlist ed in the dashing Dixie Greys in Little Rock. He was Henry Morgan Stanley, who nine years later in Africa would say, "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" Late in Life, Stanley wrote about Camp Douglas in his autobiog raphy. The prisoner's clothes were "rotten and ragged, and swarming with vermin," but worse were the men's "ash-colored faces," their "emaciated condition," and their chronic dejection amid the mud of the great yard. They were "sunk in gloomy introspection, staring blankly, with heads between knees, at nothing; weighed down by a surfeit of misery, internal pain furrowing their faces hopeless."

Stanley's words are vivid and dramatic, so they have

Chicago Hislorical Society

been quoted and taken at face value by seemingly every writer on Camp Douglas, probably unaware that Stanley's own biographer has lately pronounced him to be paranoid and given to self-pity and lying. Yet he sure ly spoke for many of his comrades when he charged that the camp authorities "rigidly excluded every medical, pious, musical, or literary charity that might have allevi ated our sufferings .... Wewere soon in a fair state of rotting while yet alive." Not himself, however, for the turncoat Stanley, an operator, and a survivor, rather promptly renounced the CSA, joined the union army on June 4, was discharged with dysentery on June 22, later joined the U.S. Navy, and deserted it too. In contrast, some Mississippians, when the Tribune asked their opin ion of Camp Douglas, "said that they would wait till they 'got well out of this scrape' before they said any thing about it- their air and bearing, though courteous, betokening that they were ready to continue the fight and carry it to the bitter end."

Winter was bad at Camp Douglas, but summer could

be worse. On June 9 the upbeat Tribune claimed chat "The location of the camp itself is very healthy." On the contrary, a later photograph shows standing water in the great yard, and the trouble was precisely the lakeside site: low marshy land impossible of proper drainage. That month the Post Surgeon warned that "The surface of the ground is becoming saturated with filch continued on page 4

M a r c h I 9 9 4

continued From page 3 and slop from the privies, kitchens, and [barracks] and must produce serious results to health as soon as the hot weather sets in." The president of the Sanitary Commission, a civilian watchdog organi zation, wrote the commandant that "nothing but a spe cial providence .... can prevent it from becoming a source of pestilence before another month." He cited overcrowding, and soil reeking from unspeakable latrines.

Actually the Confederates from Fort Donelson and Shiloh were comparatively fortunate, by Civil War prison standards, for in September 1862 all 7800 men in camp except those in the hospital were "exchanged" back to the South in a 1:1 swap for union soldiers held by the CSA. The Tribune ( and it sounds as if a new

reporter was on the beat) expressed th humane view that, "It is only a wonder the whole 8000 filthy hogs did not go home in pine boxes instead of on their feet."

The shocking mortality rate is the nub of the Camp Douglas story. Item: when 3800 new prisoners taken in Arkansas arrived in

January 1863 they may have brought smallpox with

them. But whatever the cause, of 3884 men in camp, 387 died

in February alone. This was IO%

in four weeks, nearly l 4 every day for

a month. Hundreds more jammed the camp hospital. In early April the Tribune said 700 had died in ten weeks.

As the war ground on, the quality of Camp Douglas administrators improved, too slowly. More fresh-water hydrants were added, too lace, and in July 1863 (the time of Gettysburg and Vicksburg) a proper sewer was dug, too lace. But there was official bitterness too. When the commandant requested improvements in the camp buildings, the War Department replied chat the Secretary of War (the vindictive Stanton) "is not dis posed at this time, in view of the treatment our prisoners arc receiving at the hands of the enemy, to erect fine establishments for their prisoners in our hands." Lacer, when the horrors of Andersonville in Georgia became known, the president of the Chicago Board of Trade actually urged Lincoln to retaliate by setting up an equally brutal prison in the North.

The population at Camp Douglas constantly fluctuat ed between empty and overcrowded. There was excite ment in November 1863 when much of the post burned down, the Confederates cheering like mad. The camp's layout was changed, from the quadrangles shown in our 1862 bird's-eye view to parallel streets of barracks run ning east and west, as seen in our photograph showing a

throng of prisoners in the yard. The wooden fence was made stronger and raised to twelve feet, for there were escape attempts of every known kind, some extremely ingenious and some successful. In three years, about 320 Confederates made it over or under, or out the front gate itself, if only briefly. There were eight tunnel

escapes in all, the soft sandy soil cooperating, once by

nearly 100 of John Hunt Morgan's cavalrymen, most of whom were soon corralled. (I like the sound of that out fit because they circulated a newspaper in camp, "The Prisoner's Vidette," four pages, handwritten.)

A more sinister threat came in November 1864 with the "Chicago Conspiracy," when it was believed that southern sympathizers and "imported thugs" would attempt release of the 7500 prisoners in a massive jail break. The plot was neutralized by the arrest of leading suspects on the outside, to the especial relief of citizens living near the camp. Ir was about chis time ( the fall of Atlanta) chat the camp's population touched 12,082, its highest point.

Such a number is numbing. Look instead at our photo of twelve prisoners who sat for their picture one day. Herc are the actual men themselves, and they bring con c rcrc particulars to my general

account of the camp: in their ragged pants, their thin cigars, their individual ways of wearing their hats, the deadly

sober faces. Young men hanging out together.

Not one smiling.

After Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865, Camp Douglas soon emptied and was torn down (except for one building which is said to have sur vived as lace as l 940). A purifying fire would have been best. More Confederates had died there, in our midst, than in any other northern prison, because Douglas was the largest and longest-running. In rough figures, about

4500 men died at Camp Douglas in 31/2 years, out of a

transient total of nearly 30,000, for a mortality rate of 15%.

Throughout the war, dead prisoners were carried to

the city cemetery at the southwestern corner of what is today Lincoln Park. When that burial ground was removed they were brought to Oak Woods Cemetery in April 1867 and reinterred in concentric circles in a two acre plot purchased by the U.S. government. Also brought in at chat time were those who had died of smallpox and been buried in a special plot near Camp Douglas.

In 189 l an association of ex-Confederates in Chicago raised money for a monument, a 40-foot column of

M .1 r c Ii I 9 9 -t

Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas

Georgia granite erected in July l 893, during our Columbian Exposition, and dedicated in May 1895 with President Cleveland and cabinet members present. Congress later decreed that graves must show each sol dier's name, so huge metal plates were affixed to the base of the column and today we can read the names (99.9% British), the CSA army unit, and the home state of 4357 of the 4500 who died at Camp Douglas, from Ezekiel Able to J.L. Zollicoffer.

According to the War Department Register at Oak Woods there are 32 nameless "unknowns," a few sailors, a black man, not one officer, and l 43 instances in which bodies were "removed" and "sent home" (virtually all to Kentucky addresses). Every southern state is represented, the cast coast the least; Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas the most. Today, hundreds of southerners visit the Confederate Mound every year.

Chicago Historical Society

For each name and number lying at Oak Woods there was also a desolated southern home where he was son or husband, father or brother. He joined up, and as a sol dier followed the flag-and could never have conceived that he would die in Chicago.

In 1992 the Confederate Mound was nominated for

local landmark status for its importance in Chicago his tory. The proposal became politically untouchable in the ciry council when an alderman called it, according to the S11n-Times, "very offensive to thousands of black people in this city." To grant landmark status would, in his view, show official approval of the dead Confederates' attempt "to continue slavery for millions of blacks."

Meanwhile, the mass grave in our neighborhood, and the dreadful prison stockade it reminds us of, remain terrific facts in Chicago's past, unique, intensely sugges tive to the historical imagination.

M .1 r c h I 9 9 +

photo by Noncy Hoys

DOUGLAS ANDERSON TO SPEAK AT HPHS ANNUAL DINNER MEETING

Doug Anderson, expert on Jackson Park, its history (including its 189 3 glory days), its flora and fauna, guide for the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and charter member of our Historical Society, will speak to the Society's Annual Dinner Meeting on Saturday, February 26, 1994, at

the Quadrangle Club. His topic will be: The Columbian Exposition in Retrospect. He is pictured here with HPHS members at the site of the 1893 Fair as he led them through the Fairgrounds during a lecture and walking tour which he

graciously gave for us last October.

March 1994

Hyde Park Historical Society

- Collecting and Preserving Hyde Park's History -

Time for you to join up or renew? Fill out theJann below and return it to:

The Hyde Park Historical Society

5529 S. Lake Park Avenue • Chicago, IL 60637

-----------------------·-----·-·--------··-·--------..,-,_,, , , , , ,

,_,

, ,

Enclosed is my

new

rmewal membership in the Hyde Park Historical Society.

Member $10

Contributor $25

Sponsor $50 Benefactor $100

Name _ Address Zip

M.,rch 1994

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Hyde Park Historical Socie

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Pork Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

Notes from the Archives

by Stephen A. Tnjjma11, HPHS Archivist

From time to time letters arc received by the Hyde Park Historical Society from persons asking for information about individuals, families or institutions that have some connection to Hyde Park. Recently, we received a request which provided an unusual opportunity for us to xplore some of the early social history of our communi ty. The following is an edited example of that exchange,

elaborated considerably for the benefit of our readers.

July, 1994

Dear Sir.·

My h1da11d and I are are involved in research 011 the life ef Lt. Cd Richard Swain Thompson. Born i11 Cape May Co11rt House, Nnv Jersey, he served i11 the Army ef the Potomac during the Cillil

Wiir. After thr war, he ,111d Ins wifr C1theri11e moved to Hyde Park, thrn a rn/,11 r/1 ef Chirngo, ,111d built a house there at Chest1111t and Park A1•e11111'S. The address was later rha11ged to 5--106 East End

Avm11e.

He practiffd law i11 Chirngo, al/ended St. Paul's Episcopal Church, and was a member ef The Union League and The Kmwood Cl11l,. He was presidmt ef the faller orga11i::atio11Jor l 89 l-92.

He, his wife and cme daughter arc buried i11 Oak Woods Cemetery. l ha\le /,een searrhi11gfo1· i1iformatio11 011 the Kmwood Cl11l1 but

soJar have Jo11nd 11othi11g. My q11estio11s are:

l. What type ef rh,l, was the Kenwood:> Political, social or other?

2. When was the cl11bjou11ded and by whom?

3. Is it still in existence?

--f. Do yo11 have a11y other i1iformation a/,0111 the Thompso11Ja111ily?

Mrs. G. Poriss, Williamsburg, Virginia

Our Response:

The Kenwood Club is said to have been informally organized in the 1870s but its own directories note February 27, 1884 as the date of its incorporation. Its

Kenwood Club House, 1886 Chicago, Yesterdoy and Today

founders were accomplished and well-to-do men ( most, if not all, of them Protestants like Thompson) who had settled in or near Kenwood, then part of the larger Village of Hyde Park. Its first president after the club received a state charter was Edwi.n Potter, a banker and manufacturer, who lived at 4832 Madison (now Dorchester) Avenue. The club obtained a large frame house for its members' use on 47th Street near Lake

( now Lake Park) Avenue in 1884 and made substantial

:idditions to it in 1886. Later the club purchased title to the adjacent full corner lot where it expanded the club house with a large brick addition.

A bowling alley, dining room and kitchen were locat ed in the basement. The entry hall, office, reception rooms and ballroom were on the first floor and, on the second floor, were card rooms, billiard room, reading room, smoking room, library, and the ladies' and gentle mens' dressi.ng rooms. Adjoini.ng the clubhouse, four tennis courts were built and tournaments and parties of all kinds were held there. Privileges were extended to the families of members and their wives and daughters orga- nized drama, literary and musical continued on (XJge 2

contmuedlrompage I programs. In 1893 E. Burton Holmes I870s, became the controlling stockholder in the I880s presented one of his famous travelogues there. Gambling of one of Chicago's early professional baseball teams, the and the use of alcoholic beverages on the premises were White Stockings, from which, under other ownership, prohibited by the club. the Chicago Cubs evolved. He was a major force behind

The club's by-laws initially allowed a maximum of the establishment of professional baseball's National 400 resident members but that figure was raised to 450 League and was elected, posthumously, to the Baseball

in the early I900s. In actuality, however, its resident Hall of Fame in 1939. His personal wealth derived from membership never reached those levels, certainly for the the famous sporting goods company he founded with first twenty-five years of its history. his brother. Like Thompson, Spalding and several other

The membership fee in 1892 was $100 and annual Kenwood Club members also maintained membership in dues were $40, then among the highest charged by simi- the Union League Club.

lar clubs in Chicago. Hyde Park organizations were The Kenwood Club and its clubhouse arc long gone. allowed to use portions of the Kenwood Clubhouse at The club dtsappe:i.rs from city directories in the mid- specified times. Individual membership in the club, how- I 920s when it apparently ceased to operJte as a club. ever, was obtained by written application and sponsor- The lists of deceased members' names as well JS those of ship by two resident members who were required to members living outside of Kenwood or Hyde Park had send the governing board a written statement including grown longer with each successive edition of the club's the name of the proposed member, his occupation and annual publication. By the end of the first decade of the his home address which was then assigned to a three new century the so-called "non-resident members" could man membership committee for consideration. The already be found at addresses not only elsewhere in names of the proposed member and his spon- Chicago but in such outlying suburbs as

sors were then displayed on the club's bu!- Highland Park, Kenilworth, Flossmoor, letin board for at least ten days. -<'. - OaPkark, Glencoe. and Winnetka as Membership was ultimately ?ecided by 1,·I]V <-..5' "').. • well. The clubhouse itself apparently

the club's board, made up ot eight ,,&, \' was not razed until the 1950s, during

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directors and the clubs five, later four, :::-:-..· ; X:. • 7=. · !&: - the era of urban renewal. On the site

officers. Negative votes by any two of t-? t ? •. these men resulted in denial of the - application. Early directories listing ?f(-ey,

, today stands the Lake Village East

@ j) Apartments, a high-rise apartment build-

f'.< ing constructed in the I970s. Kenwood

members of the club and their residences • -=- -s=.. remains one of the more beautiful com-

may be found at the library of the Chicago munities in Chicago. Many of the homes Historical Society. built there during the latter part of the I800s and on Richard Thompson was a charter member of the through the l 920s remain and have been carefully Kenwood Club, and he remained a member of the club restored. One of chem, an early Frank Lloyd Wright

until his death in I 9 I 4. Another early member of the design built in 1892, stands at 4858 Kenwood; it Kenwood Club was Paul Cornell, the founder of Hyde belonged to George Blossom, a Kenwood Club member Park and one of the organizers of the cemetery where who joined in I 895 and later became one of its officers. the Thompson family is buried. Cornell lived four Reflecting population growth and increasing social blocks south of the club, at the Hyde Park Hotel which complexity of the community, there were at least six

he built and owned. The Village Foods shopping plaza other primarily men's social or sports clubs formed in is now located there. Richard R. Donnelly and his son. Hyde Park and Kenwood during the I880s and 1890s. Reuben, principals of the famous printing establishment, The Kenwood Club outlasted all but one of them.

belonged to the club and provided it with printing ser- The Kenwood Country Club, located on the west side vices. Richard lived at 4609 Woodlawn and Reuben at of Ellis Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets, was 4746 Kenwood. John G. Shedd, the man who later formed for the promotion of sports and, in particular, endowed Chicago's lakefront aquarium, and after whom tennis. It was chartered in 1895 and, while there appears it is named, joined the club in 1896 and, at the time, to have been a considerable overlap of membership with lived at 4628 El1is. Another member with whom the Kenwood Club, Thompson's name is not found Thompson would have been acquainted was A.G. among them. The club's grounds consisted of a club- Spalding, who lived at 4926 Woodlawn. Spalding, a house and at least ten grass tennis courts. A photograph highly regarded professional baseball pitcher in the of it suggests that it must have covered most of one side

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Postcard: The Kenwood Club, c. 1909

of the block, making it the largest in area of any of the clubs in the community. Its membership procedures were the same as those of the Kenwood Club. Widows of members could retain membership after the deaths of their husbands.

There were at least two earlier groups formed around sporting interests elsewhere in the comrnunity. One, the Hyde Park Boat Club, is said to have had 87 members and 25 boats in 1889 and was located on the northwest corner of what is now Harold Washington P:1rk. The other, the Kenwood Equestrian Club, was organized

November 2 I. l 885 at the residence of A.G. Spalding

and is reputed co have had over 200 members within a few years of its founding. Much local travel then was by carriage and, as a result, there were many horses stabled in the community and blacksmith's shops were not unco1nmon.

A fourth group was the Hyde Park Suburban Club, a men's social club housed at the northwest corner of Dorchester Avenue and 5 Isc Street, the site now of the Madison Park Apartments. Although the dace of its actu:il formation is uncertain, its members built and ded icated their clubhouse in 1890. Among its directors in

HPHS Archives

1892 was William Kerr, one of the two aldermen elect ed to represent the community in the first election after the annexation of the Village of Hyde Park to Chicago. He and his wife lived at 4906 Lake Avenue, lacer the site of the Bryson Hotel and now a grass lot about a half block south of the Blackstone Library.

The fifth, the Park (or Sou ch Park) Club of Hyde Park, was organized in 1886 as a family club. It occu pied a four-story building bordered by verandas and, within, contained an assembly hall, billiard and pool

r oms, card rooms, bowling alleys, and a cafe. Built at a cost of$ I 5,000, ic was located on the southeast corner of 57th Street and Jefferson (Harper) Avenue across from the Rosalie Music Hall. Paul Cornell and his son were counted among its members, as was William H. Ray, for whom one of our community's public schools is named. The clubhouse later became a hotel and was eventually razed. Powell's Bookstore is now situated at chat location.

The sixth and lase of these groups, the Quadrangle Club, founded in 1896, was originally located at what is now the site of Chicago Theological Seminary at 5757 University Avenue. In 1922 it moved to continuedonpoge4

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The Hyde Park Boat Club - East of Hyde Park Boulevard, 1885

-ontmued from poge 3 a new structure at the southeast corner of 57th Street and University Avenue. Ir is the only one of the clubs from that earlier era to have survived to the present, due in large p;m to its relationship with the University of Chicago.

As for Thompson's house, Rasher's Arias of Hyde

Park for the year 1890 shows an outline of it at the 5406 address and it appears to have been a two and a half story frame house set back on the southwest corner of the intersection. The evolution of the street name of their address was as follows: Chestnut Street ( the cast west street) did become 54th Street but Park Street, the north-south street (also called Park or Hyde Park Avenue), was changed first to East End Avenue and then, finally, to Hyde Park Boulevard. There appear to have been no houses on the cast side of Hyde Park Boulev:1rd in 1890. As a result, except for Jack Sulliv;:in's creamery or milk depot loc;:ircd on the corner at what is now 533 7-45 South Hyde Park Boulevard diagonally across the street from his house, Thompson and his family would have had an unobstructed view of Lake Michigan, then only a block cast from where they lived. Over the years that shoreline has been extended into the lake with landfill to create its present configuration of bkefront buildings, parks and roadways.

The lot on which Thompson's house stood is now covered by a modern five story multi-family residential

Chicago, Yesterday ond Today

structure, the Hedgerow Condominium at 5400 South Hyde Park Boulevard. Ir spans some five lots south along Hyde Park Boulevard and is one of the more prominent buildings in the community. In 1902, Thompson built a new home for his family down the street at 5450 South Hyde Park Boulevard. The large two and a half story red brick house still st,rnds at that address. Its architects were George Borst and John T. Tetherington.

Richard Thompson was born in New Jersey on December 27, 1837 and died in Chicago on June 5,

19 I 4. He was a descendant of families which had settled in New Jersey in the mid-I 700s and his father, elected

to that state's legislature in 1837, had extensive land holdings in South Jersey. Thompson's education includ ed the study of law at Harvard College. In August of 1862, Thompson, then 24 years old, organized a regi ment in Philadelphia for .ervice in the Union Army, le,1ding it with distinction in at least seventeen major engagements, including the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. He was mustered out in February, 1865 afrer having been severely wounded at Ream's Station, Virginia. He moved to Illinois where he met and mar ried atherine Stoval on June 7, 1865, after which they moved to Chicago and, by 1869, serried in the Hyde Park-Kenwood area. A Republican, he was elected an Illinois State Senator representing the Second Senatorial

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Some Kenwood residents apparently were concerned that the establishment of the Kenwood Club would mean the serving there of alcoholic beverages, which was anathe ma to a community strongly concerned with mainfoining its standards for public behavior. One of the club's promoters sought to allay these fears in this article which appeared in the February 9, 1884, issue of the Hyde Park Herold.

KENWOOD SOCIAL CLUB.

No Bar, and not the Conventional "Club"

District, which included Hyde Park and Kenwood, from 1872 to I 8 76. He was also the attorney for the Village of Hyde Park for the years 1869 through 1875 and for the South Park Commission from 1875 to l 880, a time when p;irklands around Hyde Park were still being accu mubted. According to Oak Woods Cemetery records, Thompson's wife, Catherine, died in 1926 and their daughter, Mary Thompson Sage in 1959. The Thompson f.1mily plot lies in the same cemetery where arc buried the bodies of those thousands of Confederate soldiers who died at Camp Douglas, the Civil War pris

oner-of-war camp in Chicago which was so movingly described by James Scronks in the last issue of chis newsletter.

We arc rarely able to respond to an inquiry to quite chis extent. In this case, howc\'cr, finding reasonably accessible material allowed us to draw together in one place information about persons and institutions in our community's early social history that expanded upon the

base that Jean Block previously established in her Hyde

Pa,·k Houses (Chicago, 1978). Sources were found in the holdings of the Chicago Historical Society, The University of Chicago's Regcnstcin Library. and in our own Society's library and archives. Readers who have further information about these early dubs or about the Thompson family arc invited to share it with the Society and chis newsletter.

Some Erroneous Ideas and Misrepresentations corrected, before Hann is Done.

Is it not singular. the degree of satisfaction some people seem to derive from misrepresentation? Truth is generally regarded as a most precious thing, and yet how seldom facts are adhered to, and alas, how often th y are distorted to advance a means to an end. This preface i intended to refer to the misrepresen tations going about touching the proposed Social

Club in Kenwood. The facts are, the movement is for the erection of a suitable building to contain a social hall for lectures, amateur performances and dances, and a billiard room, bowling alley and gymnasium. It is not, nor never has been proposed to have a club in the conventional sense of the term, but the word club is made use of, because it is the most suitable one, and therefore people are going about condemning the scheme, and giving to it a construction never intend ed by the prime movers.

It is not intended to have a bar, or make a drinking rendezvou of the place, but rather to provide a place where the resident may meet, male and female, for social purposes and to di cuss public matter likely to interest the members. It is surely a movement that appeals to all residents of whatever shade of opinion, who have the interests of the place at heart, and a desideratum, the want of which has long been felt; and it is surprising any can be found unwilling to lend their hearty approval and support to it, to say nothing of retarding its progress by misrepresentation.

Ironically, today, one hundred and /en years later, some Kenwood residents are opposing issuance of o liquor license to the Hyde Park Athletic Club, which stands on the lot adioining the one where the Kenwood Club once stood!

Thanks to Jim Stronks for his discovery of this article as well as some of the illustrations used in this issue.

SAT.

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The Society was saddmed to hear of the death of Muriel Beadle.

Her vision a11d enthusiasm were essential to the founding of the Hyde Park Historical Society. We are grateful to Clyde Watkins, a fellow fou11der,for this remembrance.

Muriel Beadle -

Our First President

I believe I first met Muriel Beadle on the day I gradu ated from U-High in 1962. George Beadle was rhc pres ident of the University, and that meant rh:1r Muriel was on the scene as well. From the beginning she w 1s a University citizen of the first order. Ir w:_is pretty excit ing for us as high school students to meet chem both after he spoke at our gr:1duation ceremonies. I w:_is espe cially enthusiastic because I was entering the U. f C. as a freshman (make chat "first year student''.) the follow lllg autumn.

Needless to say, while an undcrgr:1du:1tc I was almost totally oblivious to the entire :idministration, wirh rhe possible exception of the dean of students. who refused to Ice me enjoy my well deserved obscurity. Ir w;1sn'r until after George's retirement and my own graduation and subsel1ucnt return to the university as an employee, that I really became consciou of Muriel's continued activity in - and impact upon - Hyde Park.

Surprisingly, perhaps, I had to read about it. My par ents gave me a copy of Where Has All the Ivy Gone, Muriel's charming memoir of their years as the University's first couple. (I would be willing to bet almost anything that he who inadvertently referred to Muriel Beadle as "First Lady" received an instantaneous look which carried permanent affect.) This was about the same time I myself began to get involved in commu nity activities. Suddenly it was as if she were everywhere, or at least that's how people talked. Any time Muriel got involved in anything she made her presence known immediately.

Muriel was more than a catalyst, which is the most chat some of us can aspire to. I don't know chat she actually pursued many personal ambitions beyond her writing and the general well-being of her community, however she chose to define that at the time. People used to try to recruit her because they knew that any thing she said she would take on would receive her total concentration and effort. So once you got her to say yes, all you had to do was to get out of the w:iy and do as your were told!

This is pretty much how the Hyde Park Historical Society got started. A few of us couldn't understand how a community as important, interesting, and self-deter mined as ours had never gone about chronicling and

George and Muriel Beadle

promoting its history. Our own local historical society seemed to be an obvious nced.. Indced ir w:_is as if it was already there, cnc1scd in the block of marble. All clue was 1n1uircd was a Michelangelo, perhaps with a touch of John Henry thrown in. Jean Block and I. having drawn the short straws, were elected to meet with Muriel

,ind gain her support.

Somebody must have tipped her off because ir was ;is if she knew we were coming. W c were greeted with her characteristic good humor and that ever-knowing twin kle in her eye. She agm:d in about three minutes and then set about correcting all the planning errors we had already m:idc. (I hasten to add chat she was right, of coursc.) In an hour she sent us on our way feeling a curious mixture of triumph, gratitude :ind relief!

Now chat I have lived elsewhere for a decade, and have at least a small bit of perspective on Hyde Park and its mystical hold on its inhabitants, I can sec how smart we were to go after Muriel for this important bit of his torical sculpting. One of the most exciting - yet frustr:it ing - characteristics of Hyde Park is chat everybody, and I mean everyone, has an opinion on every subject.

Further, they have to let you know where they stand. Somctimcs you can sit in a meeting and feel with ccr tainry chat you will grow old and die before anything gets resolved.

Muriel Bc;.idlc didn't let that happen to us. We all sounded off, to be sure, and she Ice us, then she cold us what we were going to do and made it happen. Two years later we had a membership, a headquarters, a newsletter and a regular ongoing series of programs. I don't believe anyone else could have done chat for us. Thank God for Muriel Beadle, who was already a piece of Hyde Park history before we had a society to cele brate her. May there be othcrs like her lying in w:iit. I doubt it don't you?

The Hyde Park Historical Society, through its

programs • archives • library • tours • exhibits oral histories • newsletter • lectures

seeks to help the community remember its past and preserve that history for generations to come.

If you would like to join us in this interesting project and become a member of the Society, please fill out the form below.

u I " I 9 9 4

This Newsletter . .

the Hvde p. ·k ts published by

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Histor· 1 S

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founded in 1975 ganizat,o11 preserve ·1nd to record, l•llteresc i•n• .-1, hpro- mote public ark. Its head u· .?o yde

an I89J. q ,lltu·s, located·

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houses local cxhib. Park Avenue, the public onS ltds. It ts open to

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HY3-1893

President B

Editor ert Benade

Design ;:···•• NT er sa McDermott

R 1ck1e Sage

cgufor mcmbershi . $1

contributor: $25 p. 5 per year,

benefactor: $100, sponsors: $50,

Hyde Park Historical Socie NEWS E

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

October 1994

When "Chicago Day" Came to Hyde Park

(What the Books Don)t Tell You)

By Jamcs Stronks

It is astounding but true that 761, 942 people flooded into Jackson Park and the Midway on "Chicago Day" at the World's Columbian Exposition. It was October 9, !893, and the 22nd anniversary of the Chicago Fire.

The anniversaiy fell on a Monday, but the proud city declared it a major holiday. They closed the stores and offices and schools, left saloons open, and half the town set out for the Fair.

Hyde Parkers, who could easily walk over to the p:u-k, may have stayed home to avoid the crush. Chicago Day was going to be historic, a once-in-a-lifetime event, but they had been visiting the Fair all summer. They could read about the crush in the Tribune the next day:

The Xerxes claim was vintage Windy City brag. But the accountants' final total of 761, 942 is a solid fact, recorded in the Report of the President to the Board of Directors (1898), page 407. The Nevv York Ti111es the next day (after explaining that Chicago means "Where the skunk dwells") conceded it to be "the largest concourse of people ever known."

The 761, 942 people at the Fair that day were more than lived in Boston, or Baltimore, or St. Louis. Indeed, the U.S. Cms11s of l 890 proves that the Chicago Day crowd was greater than the combi11ed pop11latio11s of Albany, Rochester, Toledo, Nashville, St. Paul, Kansas City, and Indianapolis - all compressed within the fences of the fairgrounds.

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What was the impact of this human ti-:fal wave along Stony Island and Cottage Grove, and what did it mean for Hyde Park?

The answers are not to be found in the published literature of the World's Columbian Exposition, though it is enormous. The official records and histories are excellent in their way, and we will draw on them here for some statistics. But they arc institutional, limited to the precinct of the fairground, with formal photos of white facades amid deserted spaces, described in idealized generalities.

This present paper, on the contra1y, is interested mainly in people, and specifics, whether in or outside of the fairgrounds, especially people on the streets of Hyde Park, a place the insu lar, whitewashed histories do not know exists. Our informa tion here will com.e from the lively newspapers of October, 1893, with due care and discrrrion in using such fallible sources: the Trib1111e, the lnter-Ocea11, the Times, the Herald, rhc Record and Daily News, the Evmi11gjoumal, the Evmi11g Post, the scruffy Mail, and the exposition's own Daily Columbian.

Actually it was not the reporters on these dailies but their editors who wrote most extravagantly about Chicago Day. The Tribu11r op/ cd page said the Fair showed "carping critics and envious rivals" (i.e., the New York Times) conhnued on page 2

continued from page 1 that Chicago's rebuilding after the Fire, and irs maturing ever since, were a triumph nor merely commer cial, for the new Chicago could also "out-do the old artistic

centers of Europe on their own ground." In all probability, boasted the Trib, the next twenty-five years will sec "the removal of the National Capital from Washington to this, the

real center of influence and power."

Meanwhile the Chicago Times ( owned by Mayor Carter HaITison and edited by his son) was indulging rich language of its own: "With imperial mien and gracious courtesy," Chicago "has received the undivided homage of the globe," and the fairgoing multitude has "tendered its spontaneous allegiance to the imperial city of the western continent."

Chicago day was only one of many "days" at the Fair - promotions to stimulate attendance. Their pull reached well into the into the hinterland. Some 25,000 had' come to Wisconsin Day, and 60,000 to Iowa Day. Now, on rhc eve of Chicago Day, the city was swollen with out-of-towncrs:

CHICAGO DAY OVERTAXES CAPACITY OF ALL HOTELS.

Railroad Trains from All Directions Are Overloaded.

HOTELS ARE PACKED TO THE DOORS.

Why would non-Chicagoans (among them a reported 20,000 from St. Louis) flock to Chicago Day on more than 350 trains, some trains in as many as 12 separate sections, in the 24 hours previous? The answer was simple economics. The railroads had withheld low round-trip fares to Chicago all summer, and the financial panic of 1893 had caused many visitors to delay coming to the Fair. But now the exposition was nearing its close, and Chicago's twenty railroads smelled a bonanza. They cut their prices:

ROADS ALL SWAMPED.

Paralyzed by the Influx of People for Chicago Day.

Excursionists Taking Advantage of Very Low Rates.

Several newspapers said trains were bringing 400,000 or 500,000 people, but let us not believe everything we read in the papers. It is a fact, however, that thousands were unable to get Loop hotel rooms and gravitated hopefully toward Jackson Park. The histories and coffee table books have no idea what Hyde Park/Woodlawn looked like the evening before Chicago Day, so we are fortunate thar a breezy Times reporter preserved the scene for us.

To his eye, and it

was a point made in many papers, usually with

a tinge of mockery, these tourists were "in large measure bucolic; every farm and hamlet within a radius of 200 miles must be deserted." The Illinois Central, he went on,

dumped them by hundreds al eve,y stalio11 between 53rd a11d 67th Streets. In droves the people surged toward the nearest hotels; they crowded the lobbies and demanded beds and food. I'hey go/ 11either.

From the swell hotels dow11 to the big bamlike world's fair hotels it was the same story. Way down at 5ls1 Street the Hyde Pa,·k Hotel had 4 50 g1-1esls in 1he house a11d had turned away 50 by l 0 o'clock. Across the way the Chicago Beach Ho1el had 900 gues/s in the ho11se and was tumi11g away people willing to pay any price.

There and al the Hyde Park cots had been p11t in every corridor. At the World's Inn (60th at Dorchester) there were l 250 people

Thoma11ds wandered aboHt the streets hr the vicinity of Jackson Park until 111id11ight, unable to find a place to sleep. They thronged the restaurants during the early part of the e ening a11d ate the hours away. They went to Bi!lfalo Bill's (wild west show, a block west of Stony Island between 62nd and 63rd) and he tu med away a good l0,000. They went against everyflim1lamgame, shooting gallery, a11d variety pe,jorma11ce 011 Stony Isla11d Avenue, 63rd Street, and

Ortobcr I 9 9 +

Cottage Grove Avenue. Theyfillrd the Midway and made the gflltir oriental's heart rejoice and his pocketbook fat. By l l o'clock the fakirs along Stony Island Avenue had fumed their shootinggallrrirs, m1m- 11111s, and book shops into slrepi11g places.

The Inter-Ocean said thousands did not go to bed at all but slept in doorways or, sleepless, "lived on nervous excitement," the Dai News adding that "tricksters fleecing World's Fair visi tors" supplied some of that, for example in crooked gambling games in rents near Ease 63rd Street. Probably many cud find rooms in the 220 "world's £-ur hotels" between Kenwood and South Shore listed in Donnelley's IAkeside Direaory for 1893, even if some of these 220 may have been merely lodging house .

Chicago Day dawned cloudless, "a crystalline day of diaphanous atmosphere," sang the Evening Post, the Tribune adding that the lake was sapphire and amethyst and turquoise. Over th.is spark.Lng sea, which was surely the loveliest way to go to the Fair, a dozen passenger boats (steering wide of the Hyde Park Sands at 49th Street) shuttled back and forth all day and half the night, carrying an estimated 40,000 from the Van Buren Street dock to Casino Pier at 63rd Street and back again.

Ocl1ers rode to the Fair in the 500 to 600 ca.tTiages, bug gies, wagons, even one haycack, "anything which would carry people," which the Times claimed were parked all day on Dorchester, Kenwood, ;md Kimbark, each with its patient horses waiting to go home.

But most of the Chicago Day crowd, well over half a mil lion people. came to Hyde Park/Woodlawn on the Illinois Central and on streetcars. The ICRR ran 35 non-stop steam trains to Jackson Park, departing at 5-minute intervals, while a ciry-widc swarm of streetcars (horse, cable, md electric) bore down on Hyde Park from eve1y cLrcction except cl1e east.

Seventy additional gripmen had been brought in from Kansas City to help operate cable cars ilirough what was cer tain to be a long day of bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go, wicl1 cars sometimes only a few feet apart, free-loaders clinging to cl1e outside and perched on cl1e roo( The Cottage Grove line was prepared to carry 138,890 people in "cable trains" (3 cars each) to the west entrance of me Midway, a major "gateway".

(The very word will remind Hyde Parkers mat mere was a Gateway cLy cleaners in Cable Court as late as 1950.)

But nobody could have known that anyming like 761,942 souls would descend upon the bricks of Hyde Park/Woodlawn to squeeze ilirough the turnstiles on Chicago Day. The Tribune

later estimated me rate of admissions at 90,000 per hour, for 81/zhours, or 1500 per minute continuously all day long.

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Thterouble started early.

In one simple sentence which tells us more about Chicago Day than many chapters in me official histories, a news woman on the Inter-Ocean said, "Everybody went early to avoid the crowd."

By 7 AM. there was already a ilirong at The Viaduct, a wide new pedestrian bridge nmning east from Michigan/Van Buren to the ICRR platfonns, and beyond them to me boat dock. By 9 AM. mere was near paralysis there. It took some people mree hours to board a train at Van Buren.

At me other end, down in Hyde Park, as iliree quarters of a million people pressed themselves into Jackson Park, Chicago Day began to be an unpleasant surprise. By afternoon it was, for many, more or less of a nightmare.

People who had hoped to stroll ilirough continued on po9e 4

Chicago Day: Going to the fair The Nineties 1967

0 t o b r r I 9 9 4

The Viaduct

continued from page 3 an enchanted White City as in a utopian vision, found it difficult to stroll at all. Many were unable to get into the wondcrfol buildings because the buildings were already packed with human bodies, and people inside couldn't get out because of the tens of thousands waiting to get in.

"To add to the general discomfort," said one reporter, "nearly everyone carried a huge valise or picnic basket of some sort."

In Daniel Burnham's massive Final Qfficial Report, the offi cers of the Columbian Guard reported chat some doors were broken off their hinges and d1ain fences torn up. bur they called the fairgoers individually cooperative. Collectively, however, chis "human avalanche" was another kind of animal: "Eve1y avenue was filled with what looked a solid mass of people," wrote the captains of the Guard, and "anyone who desired to change his position simply had to let the tide drift him along toward his destination." (It was a good line, but they stoic it verbatim from the Inter-Ocean of October 10th.)

With 761,942 people on the grounds, problems abound ed, little and big. How far upwind could you hear the band play "The Chicago Day Waltz"? (Not very far.) If you were penned immobile while a fountain rained on you steadily, what could you do? (Nothing.) How many arre ts of all kinds were there? (57) Did pickpockets score big? (No, the crowd was too chick.) Of the 33,139 children on the grounds, how many got turned in to Lost & Found? (73. and according to two papers, who gave plausible-sounding derails, 19 of these hadn't been picked up yet by 9 o'clock the next morning, but isn't our leg being pulled?) Did the scores of restaurants run out of food? (Of course.) Did the 3116 water closets prove adequate? (What do you chink?) Some people gave up and

started home as early as 3 P.M.

Two grand parades had been advertised. The evening affa_ir would be a gorgeous procession of electrically illuminated six horse floats making a long loop through the grounds, each float an allegorical tableau or an aspect of Chicago's rise from Indian village to world-class metropolis. A map in the papers had shown the parade route so that a family could stake out a fine vantage point. But it did not work out chat way.

As the parade came north up Stony Island, some 5000 people waited in the street to sec it enter the fairgrounds at the 62nd Su-cct gate. Inside rhc park. the multitude there began to surge through the parade's route, halting its progress, first for twenty minutes, then at the Woman's Building for two hours. Reaching the lakcshorc, cast of the Manufactures Building, where by now hundreds of thousands of people had planted themselves to sec the fireworks. only 4 of the 21 floats could get through. The other 17, engulfed, were aban doned, their lights turned off. the horses taken out. The parade was wonderful, but untold thousands saw little of it.

By now dusk had come and with it the advertised climax: GRAND FIREWORKS. PIECES FOR CHICAGO DAY

OF UNRIVALED MAGNIFICENCE. One would sec a marvellous show from any point on the grounds - and hap pily this proved true. One had only to look up.

The highest, loudest aerial blasting came along the lakcshore, from the deck of the U.S. Illinois and from the cast end of Casino Pier. Ir shook rhc Hyde Park heavens and woke babies from 47th Street to 63d (and killed a fireworks man). Simultaneously the vast sea of people in the Court of Honor watched their own splendid pyrotechnics, while over their

0 r o b c r I 9 9 .+

heads "a slender figure in red tights walked across a trembling wire" stretched between the Music Hall and the Casino.

On the Wooded Island, which the Times had called "char pretty little place," but now "black with people" and ankle deep in picnic litter, a total of 500 pounds of magnesium "turned night to day" and"15,000 fairy lamps outlined the walks and flower beds." In the lagoons around the isfand, said the T n'b1111e, "3000 aquatic novelties burned in every form- geysers, torpedoes, fiery dolphins, flying fish, and fairy foun rains--onr mass ofliving, writhing fire."

Gerting 761,942 people to the fair had amounted to a monster popuLnion shift spread over eighr hours. But the thought of getting them out again all at the same time, afrer the fireworks, was a mind-boggling logistical prospect.

Fortunately some had already gone home. As early as 6 PM

:ill departing trains were full--hang the parade '.md fireworks. The T crminal Station with its multiple platforms was pre

pared to send off 80 loaded trains per hour and to run all night

if necessary. IC trains, 8 to 12 cars long, departed Hyde Park at 5-minute intervals. Others left the Alley L Station, by the Transportation Building, where the crowd on the stairs was tightest, most emotional and dangerous, at 2-minute intervals. Our on the Hyde Park/Woodlawn streets, cable cars filled instantly and rumbled away less than a minute apart, while Cottage Grove cars were said to have run only IS seconds apart.

The Trib1111c had compured char trains, streetcars. and boats could carry away only 367,208 people between 9:00 P.M. and 12:00, but in fact only about a thousand were left in the fairgrounds and midway at midnight, some of chem well lubricated witl1 Budweiser.

An epic exodus transpired in Hyde Park chat night. On the

morning after, the Chicago papers filled page after page with a niagara of reportage about packed masses of people waiting, tired, hung1y. disheveled, many fainting, as they inched toward jammed exits, with every Hyde Park intersection a swarn1ing crossroad.

Inevitably it was dangerous. City-wide, said the newspa pers, in column after column describing accidents, at least 22 people were seriously injured in Chicago Day traffic, many of chem out-of-towners involved with moving cable cars. Five people were killed, two on the fairgrounds. Some papers reported chat Mrs. John Tucker of Red Bud, lliinois, had a baby at the 60th Street critrance, but I could not verify this

Crowd at Congress Street Station of the "L" road

ar Cook County's bureau of Vital Statistics, so we must regretfully disregard it.

In the end, the main thing about "Chicago Day" was not the World's Columbian Exposition. The Chicago Times put it best: 'The story of the day was the crowd."

But how can we comprehend or visualize chis ocean of 761,942 people? How imagine their physical mass? Let us try:

Consider chat a man in his shirtsleeves measures 18 inches acros his chest, from shoulder seam to shoulder seam. Stand him next to another man, their shoulders touching, and together they arc 36 inches wide, or one yard. There arc 1760 yards in a mile, thus 3520 men per mile. Now line up the whole Chicago Day host in chis fashion, shoulder-to-shoulder, and you have an unbroken wall of warm bodies for 216 miles, or the distance (as the crow flies) from Hyde Park to a point well beyond Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Or to Toledo, Ohio. Or from New York to Washington. Or from London to Paris.

It is a haunting image, a fantastic Christo dream, chis con

tinuous wall of humankind undulating over hill and dale west ward for 2 I6 miles, clear across lliinois, across the Mississippi, and well into the cornfields beyond.

Now red in chis 216 miles of bodies and pack chem together inside the fairground fences - and no wonder Hyde Parkers probably stayed home to avoid chat crush.

Ir was a pc1-fect Indian Summer day. They could rake leaves.

October I 9 9 4

Wr are very grateful to Sam hair who previous has shared his mother's recollections with us. Hm he takes us back to Hyde Park in the l880s -

this time with his father, Thomas J. Hair.

A Reminiscence by

Thomas J. Hair

from a hol.ograph copy in pencil

I started in the first grade at the old Marquette School on West Congress Street, about two blocks from our home.

After about a year, Dad sold our Congress St. house and we occupied Uncle John's house in Lawndale, then a distant sub urb of Chicago, reached by street-car and a long walk, for a few months while they were at Harbor Point, Michigan, their summer home. In the meantime, Dad had bought a lot and started building a three-story house on Lake Avenue - now Lake Park) in the suburb of Hyde Park, south of Chicago and adjacent to it, where we soon moved. We three children then entered the Greenwood Avenue School where I was placed in the second grade.

Hyde Park was almost a rural community at that time (1886). The streets were not all paved, and d1e vacant property across from our home was forested with enticing trees and play spots. In the rear of the property, Dad and a few neighbors built a toboggan slide which in the Chicago climate was a boon to children. I still remember the importance attached to the right make of toboggan, and later still to the right make of skates.

The Greenwood Avenue School was outside of the Chicago school district. Its principal was Miss Phillips, called familiarly "Miss Floppy", no doubt partly on account of her figure, a dynamic person. Our teacher was Miss Agnes Ehnendorf. who came from Bellows Falls, Vermont, and taught for seven years in our sd1ool, moving up wid1 d1e orig inal second grade to the third and fourth grades. She was unique in personality and never to be forgotten. A devour Episcopalian, she occasionally invited one or more of her pupils to attend the Episcopal Church with her for Sunday worship. I remember going wirh her to a church loc.itcd on the old Am1our Institute grounds around 33rd Street and Cartage Grove Avenue, where lacer was located the Illinois Institute of Technology. She once took us as a class, also, to

suburb of Hyde Park was annexed to the City of Chicago, separation of city and church took effect, and prayer was abolished. However, Agnes Elmendorf devoted our first ses sion each morning to the singing period, thereby working in a song-prayer as a part of the music hour.

One morning a week, proverbs were called for, and in regu lar order a few pupils each day gave their choices. Herc is where I first heard, "Lost, yesterday between sunrise and sun set, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes.

No reward offered, for they arc gone forever." The quotation remains with the picture of lovely little Helen Leland, who later lost her life in a New York hotel fire. Her father owned and operated the Leland Hotel in Chicago for many years, and where Helen gave a supper and party to Miss

Elmendorf s class. With Helen, I led the grand march of the class, and I a shy boy!

The Leland home was on Drexel Blvd. and 47th Sc. Helen

was proud and amused :it the figure of Diana on the roof of the gazebo atop the house. She laughed with us about it. Her funeral was held from that house, which I attended long after our boy and girl friendship had become a fond memory.

Another feature of the unique Elmendorf class was its classroom. Each desk was covered with thin oilcloth cut to fit the desk top, with a hole cut out over the inkwell. The oil cloth was furnished by classmate Arthur Tobin at a cost to each of us of 10\t - quite ::t financial operation. Later in Lfe, Arthur became head of a merchandising firm in Chic:igo, and we were friends until his death many years ago.

For each desk, the pupil brought a small basket which he or she tied to the side of the desk for waste paper, thus avoid ing the constant traveling to the large basket in front and at the side of the teacher's desk.

Below each desk was a strip of carpet to deaden the scuff ing of active feet. These pieces of carpet represented the left overs of carpet in the homes of class members - a motley assortment. Once a week the honor of cleaning the carpets went to two of the boys who collected them, took them to the school yard, and be:it them against a tree. These were the days of student help!

On Friday afternoons we held ::t spell-downs. This was ;111 important feature, for at the end of the year a prize was awarded to the one who remained at the head of the line the longest ,md most often. One of my prized possessions now is

the (?) Museum in downtown Chicago over the

th,e

ilvcr quarter with :i ribbon attached, and won by my hard

famous Gruenther Candy Store.

Miss Ehnendorf s room was different from any other class room I have known. It had a room motto done in colors by the mother of one of the boys, Marshall Hayes, whose house was just across 46th Street from the school. I remember the group of eight boys who formed the Washington's Birthday celebration, and who rehearsed in W cllington Park just next to Marshal.l's house on the east. A few of these were Marshall Hayes, John Neems, Gordon Sibley, and myself

Miss Ehnend01f opened the class each morning with a short prayer - quite unique even in our school. When the

effort in spelling contests.

Through the year each morning Miss Elmendorf c:11.lcd for a show of handkerchiefs, and forty hands waved in the air, ead1 clutching a purportedly fresh handkerchief I will never forget d1e occasion when one resourceful boy held aloft a crushed piece of paper as a substitute for a handkerchief Our class conscience was so cle:in that the other members feared that he would come to a bad end Many years later, he became a prominent real estate developer of Chicago suburban property.

Later, in upper arithmetic classes, we learned how to paper a room. For example, a room is 20 ft by 12 ft, and IO ft high,

0 1obrr 1994

with two doors each 3 by 7 ft, and three windows each 2 by 5 ft. The wallpaper is 24 inches wide, and comes in rolls of 20 ft. How many rolls arc required?

One song that we sang with feeling in Miss Elmendorf s daily music half-hour was on Memorial Day:

"Gn'm War has smoothed his wrink&d front, And through our land 110 more

Is heard the sound of his alarms And cannon's awful roar.

B11tjarjro111 home and kindred On this Me111orial Day

Arr !Jing many loved OllfS

vflho died in Wars array."

For this was only a score of years since rhe end of the Civil

Wa1:.

On the wide window-sill in Room 9 was a saucer of water and another of seeds - feed for the crow which had become the room's pct, and whose keeper was one of the pupils who had won this coveted post by superior scholarship in some particubr study at the third grade level...

Orrobcr 199-1

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L £'909 1I 'oJJ-e::,!1-l:J

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HydeParl< Historical Socie

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

Winter, 1995

ILLINOIS CENTRAL

TheWay

to Go...

This wonderful pholo which HPHS Archivist Steve Treffrnan has just acquired from the Chicago Historical Society for our headquarters was taken on November 6, 1915. lL shows Lhe LC. Sta Lion at 57th Street; the tracks just behind it r:1ised :is Lhey are Loday.

Jean Block, in her book Hyde Pad:. Housl's, desc1ibcs the opening of the first

station (Hyde Park al 53rd Slreell in r856 and the second (Kenwood at 47th SLreeL) in 1859. She conlinues. ''A Lhird railroad station was opened at 57th Street. inili;illy known as Woodville, because thal was where the train refueled. later it was cdlcd Soulh Park."

After ils ycms of se,vice as ;1 depol. including the ;11Tival and departure of Lhous,mds of visiLors Lo Lhc 1893 World's Fair, this enormous stalion (consider Loday' skimpy pldlform shclLers!l was for , time home to the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club! Sec Eleanor Campbell's article on the next page.

Elea11orCampbcll l1as been associated wit/1 tl1e Hi;de Pad, Nrig11borlwod Club si nee 1944 uhc11 slic 1ms on tfw staffas a group 1mrhcr. lfltcrsl,c1ms cmc of11i11c clw,trr members 0Ft/1r Business and Profcssio11al A11xilia11J in existence for37 t;ew before it disbanded. Sl1e is a long-ti1 1c board n1rmbrrhaui11g sc,vcd as clwinna11 of several committees m1d as president.

C11rre11tly sl1e is a professional gc11rnlogist and family l1isto1ia11 1citli a11 i11tcrnatio11af clic11trle.

The dePark Neigtiborhood Club

by Eleanor Campbell

The Hyde Park Neighborhood Club has se,ved Lhc soulh side of Chicago since ils founding in December 1909.

Created ;is a settlement house and a neighborhood center. it continues today as a multi-program soci,d se1vice agency in our economic1lly diverse and rncially mixed community.

ln its formative yezirs the Club operated ils programs out of an abandoned railroad depot. originc1lly huill Lo accommodate the thousands of visitors aniving at Lhe 18g3 World's Columbian Exposition. lnter the

Club made use of unoccupied store fronls, empty second floor rooms over businesses. and ;111 old fire station. lL varied its activities with the space avaibble and the needs in Lhe community. Originally designed "to promote Lhe physical and moral welfare of Lhe children in the area" ils programs have

;1lways included ,1dult activities.

From 1931 to 1g48 the Club rented Lhe

buildings <1t 56th and Dorchesler, which had been the University CongregaLional Church s,mctuary. its Fellowship hall. and parsonage, for $1 a year with Lhe congregation maintaining the outside of the buildings; the Club kept up the interior. The church had merged with Hyde P;:irk Presbyte1ians ,md worshiped in their building at 53rd and Blackstone Ave. This much larger space allowed the Club to expand its progr;:ims for the first time in its history.

Oming the Depression ye;:irs, the Club's ,1ctivilies took on a differ nt dimension. There were family fun nights, a soup kitchen and activities which assisted Lhe entire fomily. An annual "human" circus was held every sp1ing ;:is ,1 culmination of months of prep,1ring acls. papier-mache' animal costumes. complete with a band

;:ind a circus p<1rade. When a large apartment building went up in flames the Club was there lo provide temporary housing and meals with the assistance of the Red Cross. With the aniv;:il of the Second World War, women came to the Club to roll b;:indages and learn first-aid procedures. These buildings were alive Lhroughout the d,1y ;:ind into the evenings wiLh

activilies for children and ,1dults.

When the hurch buildings were sold in rg48 the Club operaled decentralized programs for six years in loc;il c;chools. churches, empty store fronts ,1nd with its offices localed in the local poli e lation, which was ju_l norlh of- 53rd Strecl and Lake Park Avenue. Owing Lhal time Lhe directors of Lhe Club had to decide if Lhe agency would continue. When one of them offered Lo buy some property. which was ,1v,1ibble in Lhe center of the community. their future was secured.

ln 1953. a one slory slruclure was erecled al 55th and Kenwood, in wh;1L is now Nichols P;irk. Liter addilions

_ incc Lhen h;1ve included more meeting rooms. ,1 cr,1h shop. a posl-war quonseL-sLyle gym--repbced in 1g8g wilh ;1 sL,md,ird high school sized gym11,1sium and exp,rnded meeting ,md aclivily rooms. T11is Liter sp,1ce w;1s m,1de possible by rcnov,1Ling the old gym inlo ;i pleas;ml sun-filled room which can be divid d inlo smaller ;ireas by closing folding doors. T11e present com pl x totals 25,&o square feel.

Over Lhe years the importance of Lhe Club's work in Lhe community has been evident in ils willingness Lo sec new needs and lo make Lhe changes necessary lo

aqjusl ils programs accordingly. Today this cornmunily house offers programs and services lo ;1l1 age groups including a pre school indoor Tol Lal and ;1 full-day He,1dc;t;1rl. aclivilies and Lu Luring for element,1ry age cbildr n b fore and afler 11001. a growing youlh program for ages 11-17. a drop-in cenler and Golden Oinerc; noon me;tl for seniors. and an Older Adult 0,1y Cenler for more fragile adult_. T11ere is ,tlso a job pbcemenl progr;un

for Lhose over fifty and adult inleresl classes. Programs run all year wilh summer full-d,1y c;1mp included.

ln order Lo Furnish improved se1vices for Lhc more than 2CXX) people aided by the Club. ils staff of 12 full time and 28 part-Lime workers is headed by Mrs.

JureIlene Rigsby, M.S.Ed., Executive Director since September 1994. As Child-Se,v Director of Community Se,viccs Soulh for 14 years she man,1ged a vrniel y of programs including day care, counseling, parent empowerment. group homes. foster care. and emergency shelters. She has a strong youth OiientaLion and is familiar with the Chicago network of socic1l se,vice agencies c1nd funding sources.

A community board of Lhree dozen men and women manage Lhe affairs of Lhe Club, now in its 86th year. The cu1Tenl budget of $888.B&J come from individu,11. corporate, and foundation money. T11e Uni Led Way, government funds, program fees ,1nd rentals.

Volunleers are also pa1t of the support staff of Lhe agency. lL is. and has been, a community partner. developing and delivering se1vices in response lo idenlified communily needs.

\\ I II I t' l l lJ l) ',

S0011 it will be time for Cornell Award 1l'i1111crs 1995!

Litst year's cui1111crs and tl,ci rcitatio11s arc described below

Paul Cornell Awards

1994

by Tom Pavelec. Vice President HPHS

The Paul Cornell Award is presented yearly by Lhe Hyde Park Histotical Society to honor individuals or groups who foster and preserve Hyde Park hislory. Over Lhe years we have given a variely of these awards. c,ich well dese1ved in its own way.

The Society presented three ;1wards at ils Fehrtwry 26, rgg4 annual dinner meeting.

The firsl was presented Lo Lhe managing truslces of Lhe Promontory Apmlmenls at 5530-32 Soulh Shore D1ivc. This building. designed hy Mies van der Rohe in 1947. h;1s recently undergone some 111,)jor struclur;il work. As you pass this building you probably won't sec

:lily change in the exle1ior. And. LlwL is exactly why they received th is award.

The Truslees foced some hard decisions when Loki of Lhe rep;iirs necessary Lo the struclure. While Lhc basic integrity of the structure was al tisk. Lhey could reconstruct Lhe foundation, windows and apron suLTOLlllding the building exactly as 01iginally designed, at considerable cost. or take the less expensive route and change the focade dr;1111atic;11ly.

Th Promontory owners felt th;1t they were more Lh;m property owners, but rather custodians of

;1rchilectural history. They chose to take the more expensive route that 111;1inlained the integliLy of Lhe original design. We applaud their foresight and thank Lhem for preserving this design.

The Managing Trustees are Don Norlon. Alan Shefner and William McGhee.

The blocks of 57th to 59th on Harper Avenue are known as Rosalie Court ;md the residences as Rosalie Vi lbs. ;1 significanl ,md hisL01i slreet in Hyde Park.

Ln Jenn Block's r978 book HtJdc Par! Houses she talks about the 1885 planned development along Harper Avenue. To quote from Jean's book, ··Many of these houses have since been remodeled. but the one al 5736 H,irper is unaltered."

Our second award was presented to Tom Jones and Steve Weiner for the restoration, prese1vation and reconstruction of their home at 5736 Harper.

Tom and Steve have taken this "unaltered" beauty and with great care and sensitivity hnve enhanced its 01iginal beauty into a pure delighL thc1t even architects of the late r&:lo's would hnve admired.

Ln addition to exterior :md inte1ior restoralion of this Queen Anne home. they h,we constructed a rear

Paul Cornell

;1ddiLion that blends wilh the miginal design perfectly, leaving one to wonder where the oliginal ends and the new begins.

They endeavored to maintnin the originnl design by removing the entire bnck facade, adding a three story addition, and Lh n reconstructing the original facade. They <1ccomplished their mission. ln addition, they scoured the city to find door and window hardware Lhal exactly matched the otiginal wherever it had been replaced by previous owners.

Exterior paint chips were analyzed to determine 01iginal colors and all missing wood members replaced. They researched landscaping of the era and have duplicated it as closely .:is possible.

Kudo Lo Tom and Steve for a job well done and our Lhanks for their determination to reconstruct history.

....._>---0-<.......

The final HPHS award, but no less significant, was prescnled to sLudents and faculty of the William H. Ray School for foste1ing and encouraging the history of Hyde Park.

The HisL01ical Society believes that the study of history must be encouraged in young minds and hearls. Last year. the Ray School's 100th anniversary, Lhcir students were challenged to find out 1d10 was William H. Ray?

lt was an interesting exercise for Ray School studenls, giving them a sense of the history of Hyde Park. They learned and grew from the expelience, explo1ing Lhe path from past to present.

We congratulate our Paul Cornell Award winners.

Well done! '

\.\' I II I V I I I} l)

Yo.u should Know About...

■

The on-going exhibit at HPHS Headquarters:

University Church Celebrates 100 Years

This interesting exhibit was prepared by Eleanor C1mpbell. Church member md hislori,m. who recently has published ,1 book on the Church's long ye,irs here in Hyde Park. The exhibit fe;itures a roo year Limc-linl'

;:-is well as photos. documents. and m,rny ol<jecls rebting lo the church's hislory. Don't miss it!

■

The up-coming exhibit and program:

Forty Years of Urban Renewaf

Be w;itching for notice of our HPHS Spring Focus commemorating the 40th anniversary of Urh;in Renewal in Hyde Park. We plan to h1ing together memo,ies. photographs. maps. elc. Lo document and presc,ve that strategic moment in our recent hi Lory. LF you have any m,1leri,1ls or memo,ies you would like

Lo shme, please call Program Ch,1im1.1n Alice Schlessingcr.

493-1994, or cdl headquarters and leave :i mcc;s;1gc.

■

The Annual Meeting of the Hyde Park Historical Society

Saturday, February 18, 1995 The Cliff Dwellers Club

Orchestra Hall 220 S. Michigan Ave.

Speaker: D;ivid T1c1itl

J11uitatio11s linuc /Jcc11 moiled. Call /1cadq11u1ters if_11u11 linuc11't nYciucd yours.

HPHS Exhibit The White City As

It Was Wins Award for Excellence

This wonderful exhibit of exceplioml 18g3 half-tone photos hy Willi,1111 Henry Jackson ;is well ac; m;I11y items of inlercsl - from poslctrds ,111d Lickcts to souvenir chin;1 plates - w,Is mounted hy HPH members Ed Cimphell ;111d Steve Treffm:111 to commcmor:1Le Lhe r893 Columbi:111 Exhibition. Lt received ;Ic; Award tor Excellence from the Asc;oci;1Lio11

ot Lllinois Museums ,md Hic;Loric;il Societies. ot cighL

st;1te-widc ;1wards. HPH S won two!

■

Newsletter a Winner Too!

Thl' HPHS Ncwslcller :tlc;o received ;111 Aw:1rd tor

E>-.ccllcncc! 13olh ;1w;1rcls were ;mnouncl'd ;1L Lill' :11111u;il llll'L'Li1w;::, of Lhc Associ,tlion ot Lllinoic; Muscumc, ;1nd Hislorictl Socit'lics on November 11. 1994.

The editor wishes Lo th:mk those mcmhers ;111d l,iends whose .irliclcs h,1vc been so well rese;1rclied

,111d documcnled :111d so dclighLFully wrillen th,tl we were considered excellent!

\\ I 11 I 1· I I () () ,

S0111e 11w11tlis ago. Ted A11derso11. n fo1111di11g mernberofHPHS. passed mmy.He is remembered /,ere /Jy a fc//01t· fo111uleral1({ fric11d, Deuerc11x Bendy.

Recollections of Ted Anderson

l Firsl mel Ted Anderson when I was ;1 small hoy

:md my bmily were cuslomers of his slore ;:iL 1444 E;1sl 55Lh SLreet. lL was a large. old foshioned hardware slore.jusl Lhc sorl of place a boy who liked to work wilh his h,mds loved to hang mound. 1i1e store was delighLl·ully messy. wiLh hundreds of boxes and hins full of misc llaneous pmls and g;1dgeLs. nothing like Lhe bland. s,mitized horne ccnler slores of Laday. where everyLhing is in plasLic hags. ln tho_c days Hyde P,irk h.td ;1 half dozen or so good hmdwarc slores. on 57Lh

Lreel. especi,tlly 55Lh. ;md 53rd SLreel.

1i1c only one who knew where cvcryLhing was in his

<,Lore. of course, was Ted. ;ind Lhe cnlirc operalion revolved ,trl)Und him. He knew mosl of Lhe cuslomcrs by 11;1mc. ,md :dmosl everyone who c1me in Lo Lhe '>Lore soughL him out tor ;idvicP on whal merch,mdise Lo buy. or how to do ;1 p,1rlicubr repair. The slorc w;1s

,d<,o ;1 g;1Lhering poinl forjanitors in Lhc are,1. who

<,Lood ;iround Lhe nickel Coke machine Lo sw;1p slories ahoul Lheir Len;inls. m;:iny of whom were studenl<; or professors. who did1i'L h;ive enough "common scn<,p" nol Lo pul gm1se down Lhc sink. or Lo lock themselves oul ot Lhcir ;ip,irlmenls.

Yc;irs Liter. when l goL Lo know Ted much heller. ill' hr;igged Lo me Lh;it he h:id only one joh hi'> enlire life. He w;1s horn in Hyde Park in 1908. .inc.I allenc.lec.l R;1y School ,ind Hyde P,irk High School. where he loved Lo work in Lhe shops Lh;iL were i.tl('r moved oul when

hit ;1go Voc,tion;il High School w;i<., huilL. When he w;is 10 ye;1rc; old. in Lhe Fourlh gr;1de. he h,,d a friend whose Lither owned Lhe Im.ti h,1rdwarc slore. Thl' hoy Loki Ted Lh,1t his bLhcr needed ,1delivery hoy. ,md he gol Lhc joh. Eighteen ye;irs J;1Lcr he houghL the slure. hy Llwn owned by the W;igner 13roLhcrs. ,md renamed il

A.T. Anderson H;1rdware.

Du,ing Lhe Depression Ted kepl Lhe sLore going hy purch;1sing Lhe slock of olher South Side h;irdw,1re '>lore<; LiwL were going oul of business. and by buying dislresscd merchandise from wholes,1lcr<; al bargain p1ices. For ex;1mple. he once boughL 75 broken wooden ironing bo;irds for Lwe11Ly-five cenls e;ich. horn which he

was ;1blc Lo rep.iir 50 or oo of Lhem. Lo sell for $5.cx) a piece.

The wood slove in the he;idquarlers w;1s purchased by Ted ;1L ;1 b,mkruplcy sale and sal in his g;ir.ige for alrnosl 50 years before being used for Lhe firsl Lime. ln order Lo mike ends meel. Ted also did ;1 loL of repai1ing of small appli,mces ;1L Lhe slore. and he was ;i m;1sler locksmilh.

Ted and his wife Lillian raised Lheir three children in Lhe large frame house al 5627 Kenwood. He could oflen be <;een smoking his cigars on the front porch. because his wife didn'L like him Lo do it in the house. He was cxlremely ;icLive in the Hyde Park Methodisl Church. which was laler Lorn down. and Lhe congregation merged wilh Lhe United Church of Hyde Park on 53rd Stre L. He loved music and often led singing al the church. He and his family could usually he seen ealing Sunday dinner. afler church. at the Tropical Hut resL,1uranL on 57Lh Slreel.

Otl1er Lh;:in hi family. his business. and his church.

Ted spent an enormous amount of Lime involved in various volunleer activities in the communily. He w;:is a member of Lhe local DrafL Board for 20 years. a m,1tler of no small inlere L lo me and my m;:ile contemporaries. since we were of draft age during Lhe VieLn;:im war. He was also aclive in. and usually ch,1irman of. a virtual "who's wl10" of Hyde Park organizations, including Lhe YMCA. Kiw,mis Club, 5Lh W,ird Cilizens Commitlee. Hyde Park-Kenwood Communily Conference, Soulheast Chicago Commission. 55Lh Slreel Businessmen's Association.

Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, Mason's. and Schrincr's.

When the Hislorirnl Sociely was formed he w,1s in charge of elling 100 Charler Memberships ;1L $100 each. which provided Lhc nucellus of funds to rehabiliLale Lhe headquarlers. We worked very closely Logelher on Lh;il projecl.

In Lhe I.iLe t95o·s, Ted's 01iginal store w;is slated for demoliLion ;,s p;1rl of Lhc urhan renewal pb111. He moved Lo ;1much smaller inlcrim localion. ;it 1215 Easl 55Lh Slreel. helween Kimb;irk and Woodlawn. where he wa lornLed for 8 years. 1i1e ,iclual move was made by a p.tmde ot volunleers c1nying Lhe merchandise from one sLore Lo another in ho1Towed Co-op Food Store shopping rnrls. Evenlu;illy he and olher merchanls. '>uch ,1<; "Mr. G... built Lhe 53rd SLreet ;md Kimb,irk Shopping Pbz;1 where his slore w;1s relocaled. A few ye,1rs later lie relired. ;1fler 55 years in the hardware hu'>iness. Lhe dean of Hyde Park merch,mls.1i1e store Lh1ives Locby. of course. now known as Anderson's Ace Hardware. enlarged ;md owned by his proLege. George Alguire. George h;1s rccenLly himself celehraled 50 years in Lhe h.irdw,ire business, hul Lh,1t is anolher sloIy.

ln rg8o. afler his wife died. Ted moved Lo Hawaii.

where hi. son Ronald is an engineer. He shipped his (·urnilurc. belongings and Lools in an enormous conL.1iner. Lh,1L ,ilso included his beloved Mercedes Benz ,1ulomobile. H' died in H.iwaii on J;:inuary 18, 1994. ,md a mcmo1i,1l sc,vice was held for him nt the

UniLed Church on February 5. 1994. Even though he had

moved from Hyde Park ,1lmost 15 years ago. more Lhan

;1 hundred o his old hiends gaLhered to reminisce

;ihoul him. He will nol soon be forgoLLen. :•:

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Notes from the Archives

by Steve Treffman

T1ie brief reference to the early l1istory of the Quadrangle Club i11 tl1c]11ly. r994 issue oftl1is 11etl'sletter i11spi rrrl a letter from Ed Campbell:

ln Notes from the Archives (July 1994) Stephen Treff man recounts in fascinating detail early social clubs in Hyde Park - Kenwood. There was a minor etTor in locating the first Quadrangle Club building at 5757 University Avenue. lts actual location was across the street at the southeast comer of 58th Street and University Avenue. The entrance was on 58th street facing north.

And thereby hangs a tale: the location of the Club on 58th street with the main facade looking nmth is a determining factor in the ultimate fate of that building which Jean Block in The Uses ofGotl,ic (University of Chicago library rg83) desciibes as "having the appearc1nce of an English country house with a few

neo-clc1ssic features." The building was designed in r8g6 by Charles B. Atwood, architect of the Fine Arts Building (now MSl) at the 18g3 Columbian Exposition.

The Club was pressed to find a new location in 1915 when the University developed a plan to free up the block for the ckipel and its adjacent buildings. The University contributed $IOO.<XX) toward a new building

which was ornpl t d at the present site. 57th street and University Avenue. in 1922.

The old Club house w,1s turned over to the School of Commerce and Administration and used until 1929 when th site on 58th street was redesignated for the 01iental Institute.

The old Qund Club building was cut in two. a 12 foot section r moved from the center. and the two parts moved lo the present location at 58th and Lngleside where they were rejoined.

The process of moving involved setting the structures on logs ,md rolling them ;icross the m,1in quadrangle, over Ellis Avenue to the site west of the present bookstore. This was an arduous undertaking nnd no unnecessary moves. such as ,l!l 18o degree turn lo maintain the original street rnientation of the building. were apparently entertained. Moving directly west to a site on the north side of 58th street resulted in the back of the structure facing the street and the front of the sb,JCture facing north toward the Buildings and Grounds shops.

ln recent years the maintenance buildings have been removed to create the Science quadrangle and the old Quadrangle Club. now named Ingleside Hall. has an open green spac as an approp1iate setting for the cl,1ssic ch,irm of ils Fronl facade.

- Edrrnrd A. Cnmpbell ►

\'\ t 11 t t' I I \) q ')

Steve Trcffinan responds:

Actually. the Quadrangle Club had a number of homes before what is now Ingleside H,111 was constructed. as Ed conectly notes. on the southeast comer of Fifty-eighth and Univer ity. the site now of Lhc Oriental Institute. O1iginally. the club was orgm1ized by and for University of Chicago male b ulty in 18g3 at the old Del Prado Hotel. than called the Barry Hotel. where many of the club's early members lived. lnlernalion;1I House st;mcls there now. The club was incorporated in 1895 ;111d ;1 three story red brick lub house was built on th,1L Fihy-eighth ;md University

c-orner ;111d opened on June 19. 18g6. ln r8g7, however, il experienced three successive fires. li1e third. on December 25. 1897. caused such extensive damage that lll,)jor reconstruction w,1s m,1de necess;iry while, a well. ,11lowing expansion of the old building. For

;1pproximalely six months thereafter the club m;1int;1ined temporary quarters at a building Lk1L once stood at what is now 1358-136o East Fifty-eighth. On July 26. 18g8, thenew club house. now twice the size of its predecessor hut retaining the original focade. w,1s onc,e1gain opened lo its members. The brger quarters were needed because of an increase in the club's membership whicl1 occured when a change in requirements allowed men to join who were not University of Chicago faculty. By 18g7. these "community" men made up almost half of the club"_

rncrnhcrship ot 165. Women b1cully members were nol

;ii lowed full membership until the late 1940s. The building cont.1ined a libr,iry. dining room. meeting rooms. gymn;1sium ,md living qu;irter tor some of the club's members. LL was this building Lh,1L eventually would he trundled ;1cross the c1mpus lo become Ingleside Hall. For more information see: Emily Kadens. Crenting A Scmc ofSocichr Tl1c Qundrm1glc C/11/J,1893-1993 (Chicago. 1993), published by the Club and available al Regenslein library Special Collections.."

Acw111pr111ying t/1is a,ticlc. is a postrnrd vic1c oft/ 1c rca r or sout/ 1 facade of the Quadrangle Cl11h and its tennis co111ts as t/1cy appeared around 1915. At tl1e fnrlcfl bcl1i11d the Quadrallgle C/11/J in this il/11stratio11 nwy l1c seen Semi I ICl 11/ House at 5757 South University. 01igi1wlly a professor's home, it l!'C/S convc,tcd into administrative mid faculty offices for the Chicago Theological Semi 11my 11/ltil it 1ms ra:cd forcxpa11sio11 oft/Jc Se111i11a,y. Tl1c recent plwtograp/1 oft/1e rear oflnglcsidc Hall reproduced /,ere may be compared to a11 early vie1l'ofthc fmnt oftlw club lwuse appearing in]ea11 Block Uses of the Gothic ICl1icago. 1983), page 210.

LJI"'..·:d_--H-o-l:l·-:s-o-;u.t-h:'e:le:'v:ol1;o;;n;-on 58th Street Ingles, e •

- - - - - - - - - - route of relocation

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HydeParl< Historical Socie NEWSLETTE

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

Spring, 1995

The Society is grateful to Scott Elliot, chairman of the Cliff Dwellers' Art Committee, who spoke at our Annual Dinner which was held at the cliff Dwellers.

Scott Elliott

THE CLIFF DWELLERS:

The Hyde Park

Connection

by Scott Elliot

Chairman. Art Committee. clilfDwellers

Good evening, and welcome to the Cliff Dwellers Club.

1he exhibit you see on the walls traces the history of the club from its inaugural dinner in this room in Ig:Jg until just about the present

1he founders were men of letters, artists, architects. and musicians as well as lawyers and businessmen.

Today the membership is made up more of businessmen than artists. but we have managed to keep alive the spirit of the place and have tried to maintain the ideals or our predecessors.

Like Hyde Park. the Cliff Dwellers Club is to a

considerable extent an outgrowth of two historic Chicago events. First, the World's Columbian Exhibition of 18g3, which brought artists, builders. poets, and creative men and women of all descriptions to the boom town that Chicago had become in the twenty-year aftermath of the Great Fire. Second was the founding of the University of Chicago.

Having spent some years in two university towns - New Haven. Connecticut, and Evanston, Illinois. I know that the relationships between universities and the general population are not always as happy as they might be. But from my vantage point it would appear that Hyde Park's relationship with the University of Chicago is a close and largely positive one, not unlike, until quite recently. that is. our relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestral Association. Now, after eighty-seven years of harmonious and mutually beneficial coexistence, we have been slapped with a notice of eviction from the home that we built with our own resources - and in which we believed that we were secure - at least as long as Orchestra Hall is still standing.

Not only did we build this club house. but several of our founding members were also continued on page 2

At the Annual Meeting...

Tom Pavelec, new president of HPHS, and his wife Georgene,

approve a motion.

Caught by the camera: Mary Irons, HPHS board member and State

Representative Barbara Flynn Currie.

Cliff Dwellers continued From pag,e

largely responsible for building and financing Orchestra Hall, as well as the orchestra itself. Daniel H. Burnham was the architect and the chief fund-raiser for the building. Charles L Hutchinson was a founding member of both groups and a major financial supporter of both.

Burnham died of a sudden illness on a trip to Europe in 1912. When his dear friend and fellow Cliff Dweller, the grand old maestro, Frederick Stock. learned of his death just before a concert, he conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the funeral march from Wagner's Gotterdiimmerung as a final tribute to its greatest patron. When Hutchinson died in 1924 heleft a legacy of $5,exx> and one-tenth of the income from a

$250,exx> trust to his beloved club, no doubt in the belief that its future was secure. It is not hard to imagine what he would make of the present situation - one of the many of Chicago's cultural institutions which he helped to create (including the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago) turning its back on another. In Hutchinson's day commerce and the money produced therefrom was at the service of art

He saw the fine arts and the humanities as the ultimate reward of commerce and industry and as a redemption from their darker, more sordid aspects.

In no place, more than in this room, were these ideals nurtured and cultivated. In those days the Fine Arts Building down the street was burgeoning with the studios of illustrators, muralists, craftsmen, and musicians. Downtown was full of bookshops, galleries, theatres, recital halls, and restaurants crowded with enthusiastic and idealistic "dilettanti," Bohemians, bibliophiles, academicians, journalists, typographers, tradesmen, and captains of industry in the pursuit of culture. The cliff Dwellers is one of the last survivors of this era.

The old fire may have burned down somewhat, but

the embers still have a healthy glow to them, and with a bit ofluck and a lot of perseverance, its warmth and light will be rekindled for a long time to come.

Many of the early Cliff Dwellers lived in Hyde Park where they found the same kind of congenial, comfortable, unpretentious, yet stimulating atmosphere. Frank Iloyd Wright, who was a Cliff Dweller for a short time, and his friend and fellow architect, Howard Van Doren Shaw, who was a founding member and a life-long Cliff Dweller both built a number of houses in Hyde Park. Shaw designed a house for sociology professor, George Vincent; Mrs. William Rainey Harper; Edgar J. Goodspeed, the orientalist, in 191q Henry Hoyd Hilton, the publisher,

Spring 1995

on Woodlawn, which later became the residence of the chancellor, Edward Morris, on Drexel Boulevard; and the Quadrangle Club in 1920.

Wright designed a house for George Blossom and one for Warren McArthur in 18g2, both in the 48oo block of Kenwood; the Isadore Heller house in 18g7 on Woodlawn; and, of course, the Robie house on Woodlawn in 1go8-og.

Alfonso Iannelli, the sculptor whom Wright brought from California in 1912 to work with him on the ornament for the Midway Gardens at Cottage Grove and 6oth Street (it was, tragically, tom down in 1929) also collaborated with Barry Byrne (another Wright protegel on the decorative elements of the Church of St. n1omas the Apostle on Kimbark. Charles L

Ida De Pencier (our most Historic Member at 102 beautiful years) brings HPHS archivist

Steve Treffman up to date.

Hutchinson, who grew up in Hyde Park. had a home at 5n5 Cornell Avenue until the early 18gos, after which he moved to Prairie Avenue. Martin A. Ryerson, who, like Hutchinson, was a member of the original board of trustees of the University of Chicago and its president from 18g2 until 1922 was also a Cliff Dweller. Ralph H. Norton, who was a student at the university and later became head of Acme Steel lived at 4930 Woodlawn.

He was a trustee of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy until it was absorbed by the University of Chicago, as well as a trustee of the Orchestral Association and a governing life member of the Art Institute.

Lora.do Taft, the sculptor of the Fountain ofTlme, at the end of the Midway, lived at 5&n Dorchester and had his studio at 6016 Ingleside Avenue. Leonard Cnmelle, and Frederick develand Hibbard were also sculptors who lived and worked in Hyde Park. All three

were founding members of the cliff Dwellers. charles Francis Browne, Frank V-rrgil Didley, and Frank charles Payraud were painters who lived there. Robert Jarvie, the silver and metalsmith who designed our famous silver punchbowl which was presented to the club by Charles Hutchinson in 1910, had a studio at

1340 East 47th Street.

William K. Fellows of the architectural firm of Nimmons and Fellows lived at 4530 Lake Park Avenue.

Leo Sowerby. the composer. Joseph Zeisler, and Allen Spencer, the concert pianists, also lived in Hyde Park. Sowerby was president of the club in 1962. William 0. Goodman, who was president of the cliff Dwellers in 1919-20 and his son, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, lived at 5026 Greenwood in a house with a ballroom wiili a stage where Kenneth developed his theatrical talent.

He joined ilie Navy in World War I and died in 1918. His parents gave ilie Goodman Theatre (which had its first season in 1925) to the Art Institute in his memory. Thomas Wood Stevens lived at 57o6 Jackson Park Avenue. He was an author, teacher of mural painting at the Art Institute, a lecturer on ilie history of art, and director of the Goodman Theatre from 1925-30.

Hamlin Garland, our founding president, lived at

6427 Greenwood. He wrote many books including Main Tmvelled Roads and a Son of the Middle Border and won a Pulitzer Prize. He was married to Lorado Taft's sister.

Garland ruled the club with a whim of iron until 1914 when he moved to New York. He was one of iliose writers of whom it was said that they came to Chicago riding ilie rails and left in Pullman coaches.

Bert Leston Taylor, ilie newspaperman, known as ''.B.LT.," whose column "A Line o' Type of Two" ran in the Chicago Tribune, lived at 5526 Everett Avenue.

Pierce Butler, a professor of bibliographical history and lecturer on ilie history of printing; continued on page 5

Spring 1995

AUt CORNEtt AWARDS,-1995

Awardees were:

Eleanor Campbell

Genealogist. Member HPHS

for her research, her exhibit. and her book

University Church-The First wo Years

Bennett and Celia Leventhal for the restoration of their home at 5730 Soutb Kenwood Avenue C.elia introduces architect, Geri Kelley

Julie Gross

Architect, Chicago Park District

for the restoration of the Promontory Point Fieldhouse

shown visiting with Ed Campbell

photographs by Nancy Hays

Spring 1995

Cliff Dwellers continued From poge 3

Wmfred Ernst Garrison, a history professor. poetry editor, and president of the Cliff Dwellers from 1944-45; Ralph Waldo Gerard, professor of physiology; William A Nitze, professor and head of the Department of Romance Languages and Literature and a Chevalier of the legion of Honor in France; Percy H. Boynton, English professor and Dean of the Colleges of Arts, Literature and Sciences; Robert Herrick novelist and professor; Robert Morss Lovett, author and English professor; William Vaughan Moody. poet, playwright, and English professor (Lovett and Moody collaborated on A History ofEnglish Literature in 1g:>2}, Harry Pratt Judson, president of the University from r ::n-27; George Herbert Mead, professor of philosophy and author of Mind. Self and Society, published in 1934; Rollin

D. salisbury, professor of history: and Paul Shorey, classical scholar and professor of Greek from 18g2-1933, all were Cliff Dwellers and Hyde Parkers.

The pennanence of the relationship between Hyde Park and the University of Chicago is, of course. ensured. But this is primarily based on geographic and economic realities. For better or worse, they are inseparable. It is to the credit of both partners in this marriage that a mutual appreciation of one another seems to flourish. Sadly for us, our situation is altogether different. Instead of (sensibly) building on terra fmna we chose a rooftop (albeit a rooftop that would not exist but for our efforts and fmancial support). Our partnership with the Orchestral Association has over the years and from the beginning been based on trust and friendship. This has worked pretty well for more than eighty years.

We live in a tough world where money is - well,

almost- everything. But if we lose sight of the past, the things that bind us together, old values. old friends, a sense of honor, we also risk losing the capacity to appreciate and enjoy- even to recognize - whatever good things may be in store for us in the future.

The important thing is to keep the fire burning!

From an 1870's prospectus:

-• :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::,.

HYDEPARK

In the year 1855 the undersigned made the preliminary survey of the village of Hyde Park and at that time first conceived the idea oflaying out a town, destined to be. what it now is. the most desirable suburb of the city of Chicago: and now offers for sale at very low prices, much lower than speculators can sell, Seven thousand feet front (150 and 175 feet deep), near the GREAT SOUTH PARK in the vicinity of the fine brick depot just completed at Hyde Park. comprising some of the choicest Lake shore residence sites.

This property has the advantages of fine macadamized roads, sewerage. gas. and is supplied with lake water by the Holly Water Works which affords abundant domestic supply and protection against fire.

The Hyde Park train now affords better accommodations than any other Chicago suburban train, running every hour night and morning and at suitable intervals through the middle of the day and night. The beautiful ride on the cars along the lake shore to and from the city without crossing a single street until it reaches the village of Hyde Park, thus enabling the train to run more speedily than any other suburban route. renders it the most desirable place to

live in the vicinity of Chicago.

STATEMENT MADE BY THE MAYOR Of HYDE PARK IN HIS ANNUAL MESSAGE.

He stated that when elected about six years ago the assessed value of Real Estate in Hyde Park was $8oo,CXX>, while at the present time it was about $15,CXX>,oco; and also. after comparing with the assessor, Joseph H. Gray. the Assessment Rolls of Chicago and Hyde

l !!i Park he found the taxes in Hyde Park to be

:::::: just one-fifth of those of the city; yet Hyde :::::

j !!i Park possessed all the advantages of the city. :!gj

::::: viz.: good roads, sewerage, water and gas. :::::

:::::· For tenns and information apply to :::=:

•·•··· ····•

·:•:·::·:·-

PAUL CORNELL :::::

::;:: 159 LaSalle Street.

·i•=••:·:·:

:•;::J::i::::l:::::::l:l:l:l:l:l:::::::::l:::l:l:::l:l:::::::l:l:::::l:l:l:::l:::l:l:l:l:l:::l:l::::::::::::::::;t.J•: •

Spring 1995

David Truitt speaker at the Society's Annual Meeting, described the history of the Jackson Park Yacht Club and its many ups and downs - into the water, that is. As you can see from the postcard below, the club was built on the water and was accessible to the shore by way of a gangplank. Weather, wear, wind, and waves

occasionally sent it under.

David Truitt

lb================================== §_

Jackson Park Yacht Club

Spring 1995

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

Anyone who remembers Ted Anderson at all will be grateful for Devereaux Bowly's recol_lections n the Winter 1995 issue of the Society's consistently fme Newsletter. An addendum may be of interest to some.

As a member of the house committee of my University of Chicago college fraternity in 1947. I quickly became acquainted, and delighted, with AT. Anderson and his Hardware Company. It was a maivelous. unbusinesslike, hodge podge of quotidian essentials and artifacts that might come in handy. some day. for someone.

My bride and I bought our first hous in1954. It was at 5430 South Blackstone - built circa 18go for 1he Fair and, we were told, first occupied by the elephant trainers. Ted Anderson was always available: for plumbing. for locks. for trade references, for a chat with a confused young householder or an old widow who needed a 5¢ fuse but didn't know what size. The janitors waited their tum with the rest of us. They knew that. in their time, they would get the same full attention and the same leisurely. reliable counsel. None of this was very efficient. All of it was very winning.

Mr. Bowly noted Ted's numerous civic commitments - including the draft board. It was during this nation's ghastly entanglement in Vietnam. I only accepted an appointment because Ted asked me, and it was a painful experience for all: life and death power over young men known and unknown, none of whom wanted to go (why should they?). Well-advised ones, mostly white. who knew how to use the system to escape. Un-advised ones, mostly black. who didn't. Never again? Please, God, may it be so.

Kind regards, Charles F. Custer

Alice Schlessinger, chairofHPHSProgmm Committee,

reports:

Revisiting Urban Renewal

1he Historical Society's headquarters were open on Sunday afternoon. April 23, 1995. for people to come in and reminisce about the days of urban renewal. 1955-196o. About forty people dropped in. A powerful stimulus to memory was a ?i_splay of photocopies of pictures of pre-demoht10n H de Park, which Mary Irons had obtained from the Chicago Historical Society. Trying to identify buildings and to remember what stood where proved very intriguing to those who came. . .

Archivist Steve Treffman provided a bnef questionnaire, which visitors were encourag d to answer. on their assessment of our commumty's gains and losses through urban re?- wal. W hop to acquire other materials for an exlubit on this topic.

1he Hyde Park Neighborhood club, through the good offices of Eleanor Campbell. con b_uted a painting by Vi Fogle Uretz of the demoht10n of ne large building. This painting is extremely evocative of the days of Hyde Park A and B, and will be a cornerstone of the new exhibit.

We encourage members to bring in their own memorabilia for the exhibit. as well as their comments and reflections on forty years of urban renewal.

On May 21, Oswelda Badal, who was actively engaged in the grassroots process. reviewed for the_ Society the history of Hyde Park's Urban Renewal: its phases. projects, ups and down , legacy - its, continuing role in the commumty. Mrs. Badal s expertise gave us a fitting conclusion to the discussion which began with Ruth Knack's presentation in March. .

We hope to bring you highlights of her talk rn a future issue of the newsletter.

Spring 1995

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Hyde Park Historical Socie N WS ETTE

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Pork Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

Summer/Fall 1995

The t1Yde Park-Kenwood Urban Renewal Story

by Oswalda Badal

Oswalda (Ozzie) Badal, an early volunteer and staff member of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference during the 50s and early 6os, saw the development ofHyde Park's urban renewal from its pre-planning days to its ful.nllment Her talk to the society put the many aspects of this enormous project in a nutshell, so to speak. She has generously allowed us to reprint it here.

The community of Hyde Park-(South) Kenwood was the first area in the nation designated as an 'Urban Renewal Project". Its boundaries run from 47th to 59th Streets, Cottage Grove to Lake Michigan. It is a colorful community with an interesting history.

Growth of the Community

The chronological development of Hyde Park Kenwood started when the "town of Hyde Park" was incorporated in 1861, and Paul Cornell. known as the father of Hyde Park. became its first elected supervisor. By the time the City of Chicago annexed the Town of Hyde Park in 1889, its boundaries encompassed far more area than the present day community. The following year (18go), the University of Chicago was founded by a gift from John D. Rockefeller. At that time the community was primarily composed of single family homes with the larger, more fashionable mansions being built by wealthy families in Kenwood continued on page 2

continued from page 1 between 1885 and 1895. With the announcement and plans for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, which located at the southeastern edge of the community, a tremendous real estate and building boom resulted in the addition of many spacious walk-up apartment buildings. In the 1920s, small apartments and hotels were built to meet the needs of an increasing number of elderly people and single men and women. In the same period and through the 1930s, stores, churches, banks and schools were built leaving little open space in the interior of the community.

During World War II, Hyde Park-Kenwood like the rest of the nation underwent the pressures of a severe housing shortage for people dra:"'11 to the city to work in the defense industry. Many of the large private homes and spacious apartments in the area were converted into smaller units-many of these conversions were illegally made and were accompanied by a noticeable decline in maintenance.

Up until World War II the residents of the community were mostly well-to-do families. In addition to faculty and staff of the University living in the area, there was also an unusually high percentage of professional and business people. The newcomers who entered the community during the war years and occupied the converted units were for the most part of lower income-people coming from rural areas and the South seekingjobs. The conversions of apartments and homes begun during the early 1g4os continued after the war with no new building occurring.

The changes in the housing stock resulted in an

increase in the population of the area from about 65,300 in 1940 to 71,700 in 1950. By the end of the 1g4os, the community was showing signs of deterioration because of conversions, decreased property maintenance, and increased population all of which were overtaxing the community's facilities and se1vices (schools, parking, police and fire protection).

In the 1940s, to the north and west of Hyde Park Kenwood, the population was largely African American and rapidly increasing in number by families migrating from the South. Chicago's overall African-American population increased by 42% between 1940 and 1950. Adding to space problems in those particular areas was massive displacement for the Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores developments so that by the time restrictive covenents were finally outlawed in 1948 (which opened up areas previously closed to African-Americans), it was not surprising that in the late 1940s, that population began to grow in Hyde Park-Kenwood.

The Community Reacts

In 1949. a few people in the community felt action was necessary to stem the growing physical deterioration and to work at developing good race relations. Amongst these early leaders were Rev.

Leslie Pennington of the First Unitarian Church. the 57th Street Meeting of Friends, Rabbi Louis Weinstein of KAM, academicians Harvey Perloff, St. Clair Drake, Herbert Thelen, financial and real estate leaders Earl

B. Dickerson, Oscar Brown Sr., and Jerome Morgan.

57th Street Art Colony

Summer/fall ,995

"Panic peddling" was in full operation at that time and neighborhoods around the city turned from white to black rapidly. The early leaders determined that a new effort was needed to prevent this kind of change from happening in Hyde Park-Kenwood.

Their belief was that blacks and whites are able to live together. Since there was no one organization already in existence able or willing to act directly on both the physical and racial problems, a new group the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference was founded. Its goal was to ''build and maintain a stable interracial community of high physical standards"-a goal which was eventually adopted by the rest of the community.

With the advice and help of Tom Wright, executive director of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and Herbert A Thelen of the Human Dynamics Laboratory of the University of Chicago, and under the guidance and leadership of its first executive director Julia Abrahamson, the Conference set out to encourage the formation of block organizations so that new and old neighbors could meet, know each other and find common grounds on which to work cooperatively.

An extensive survey, developed by a Conference committee headed by St. Clair Drake and Everett Hughes and utilizing people in the new block group organizations was carried out in the area in 1950. The results pinpointed the vast number of problems, and a program which defined general community objectives was developed. This survey served as an important factor in future planning activities for the area.

The program that evolved identified five specific aspects to the program: (1) the panic and fear of the white residents, and the block busting techniques of unscrupulous real estate brokers needed to be combated through a program of education and through presentation of facts; (2) a self-help program to arrest continued deterioration in the community through strict enforcement of zoning and building code laws needed to be developed; (3) additional space for overcrowded school facilities and for playground and recreational facilities needed to be found; (4) improvement of city services (such as street cleaning, garbage collection and street lighting) was needed; and (5) redevelopment of pockets of slums and a conservation program were needed.

In 1952, as a result of public indignation about the rising crime rate, and sparked by the abduction and attempted rape of a University faculty wife, a "Committee of Five" headed by the now U.S. Judge

Hubert Will formed another organization-the South East Chicago Commission which directed much of its efforts toward improving law enforcement. The Commission also devised more comprehensive and effective approaches to the problem of the more serious illegal conversions of buildings often using such power tactics in getting insurance and mortgage cancellations for slum buildings. In some instances, its executive director Julian Levi along with other attorneys from the community served as "special" Assistant Corporation Counsel, without compensation, in trying cases involving violations of single family zoning. The Commission's most important program, however, was its role in urban renewal. The Commission's major support came form the University of Chicago and it attracted additional support of business, real estate and other institutional interests. It represented the community's conservative interests who looked with concern at the Conference's idealistic goals for a stable interracial community.

The role of the University administration was an asset and vital factor in many of the accomplishments for the community. while community residents were moved to action by the deterioration and racial changes earlier, the University had remained aloof until the effects of increased blight and crime brought the community's problems onto its front door. Reduction in enrollment because of fear for the safety of students indicated to the University that it could no longer remain disinterested. It could not afford to move the University elsewhere so it decided something had to be done to improve the climate of the community.

Over the years, there were many conflicts and

disagreements between the Conference and the Commission. Each had its own constituency-the Commission represented the University and the Conference represented the grass roots residents in the area. A constant effort was made, however, for recognition and consideration of the needs of both groups, and in the final analysis these efforts benefited both the University and the community residents.

Embarking on Revitalization

The long range conservation program for the Hyde Park-Kenwood area involved three separate projects.

The first was a slum clearance project called Hyde Park A and B which centered around continued on page 4

Summer/Fall 1995

continued From poge 3 55th and Lake Park. 1he area survey conducted by the Conference in 1950 clearly indicated this as the central core of blight in the community. In 1953, the Commission and the Conference together approached the Chicago Land Clearance Commission in an unprecedented move and asked that the city agency examine this particular area. In 1954, 47 acres ofland was designated for total clearance and three years later, Webb & Knapp of New York City, was selected as the developer for this project. 1he Hyde Park Shopping Center, which houses the Co-op. highrise apartments and about 250 townhouses were built on the cleared land.

The second major project was the Soµth West Hyde Park Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Project. It was organized and spearheaded by the University of Chicago under a State authorized program in order to provide needed student housing. 1he plan under this project (approved in 1956) involved the acquisition and demolition of about 15 acres of land between 55th and 56th Streets, Cottage Grove and Ellis Avenues. plus a rehabilitation program for the remaining buildings running south of 56th Street to 58th Street covering an additional 40 acres. This project, after court battles establishing its legality, was not implemented until the end of 1962. 1he cleared land had been designated for student housing but

eventually was developed into open playing fields for

University sports activities. During the long delay due to the litigation, student housing was provided through the University acquiring and rehabilitating many existing small unit apartment buildings scattered throughout the community. These were primarily structures built in the 1920s. In the final analysis, this approach to the problem served the community well since there was no market for these apartments and the buildings were increasingly becoming a problem.

1he third and main project was the Hyde Park Kenwood Urban Renewal Project. When the Chicago Land Clearance Commission agreed to investigate the possibilities of a clearance project in the community in 1953, it was on the condition that they would undertake the project only if it was a part of a larger conservation plan for the over-all community.

Because of this condition, it was necessary for the community to take steps to begin such planning. 1he University of Chicago and the Commission worked on two fronts toward this end. They jointly applied

Ozzie Badal speaks to HPHS

for and received a $100,000 grant from the Field Foundation to establish a "planning unit" to begin planning a conservation program. They also worked closely with other private and public organizations toward the enactment of the U.S. Housing Act of 1954 to provide federal financial assistance for this type of conservation program. Upon the passage of the 1954 Housing Act, the process of designating Hyde Park-Kenwood as the first urban renewal project in the nation began and the city subcontracted the planningjob to the Planning Unit established by the University and the Commission.

Planning Begins

The Conference had worked closely with city agencies in the development of the clearance project. They now insisted that there be full continued on poge 1

Summer/Fall 1995

Re-VISiting

Urban Renewal

Ill

Hyde Park

Sunday, October 1, 1995 • 3:00pm

Before: Photo display by Mary Irons During: Slides & Paintings by Vi Fogle Uretz After: Photos by Julie Richman

Hyde Park Historical Society Headquarters 5529 South Lake Park Avenue

Refreshments too!

Summer/Fall 1995

Down Memory Lane...

55th Street Pre-Urban Renewal

by Sister Bennet Finnegan, O.P.

Sister Bennet grew up in Hyde Park, on Kimba rk - where Urban Renewal gave us Nichols Park. Living next door to the Finnegans was Alonzo Stagg and his family. She went to school- and eventually taught - at St. Thomas. Sister, now retired and living at the Dominican Motherhouse in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, recalls the 55th Street she knew:

Fifty-fifth Street is a lonesome road for those of us who lived in Hyde Park in the twenties and thirties.

Parker Dry Goods Store on the comer of 55th and Kenwood (succeeded by Bears and then by Breslauers) was where I worked during their sales when I was in school. The important thing to remember was not to tell people what color thread they wanted but to let them choose for themselves. There was a yardstick fastened to the counter so that you could measure yard goods. I enjoyed working there.

Hazel Hoff Keifer had a store across from the University State Bank where I also worked several times.

The best memory of 55th was the Frolic Theater with the clown above the marquee who bobbed up and down. We saw Jackie Coogan and Mary Pickford, Our Gang Comedies, etc.

At the comer of 55th and Ellis was Greenberg's Delicatessen where we got delicious poppy seed twist bread.

Halfway down the street was the Chocolate Shop and the Piggly Wiggly.

At Wolfs Toy Shop we bought Chroma Packs - a set of twelve pictures from story books to color. They were 25 cents.

The shoe man was at 55th and Woodlawn - his nephew is now at 57th and Harper. Watson's Watch Maker was at 55th and Woodlawn and Bourgeau's Hardware store was farther up the street. Feinstein was the Oculist and VanDyke was the photographer. and Finnigan's (spelled with an "i") was at 55th and Woodlawn. Cowhey's Mens Store was near Ellis.

The Hyde Park Neighborhood Club was in the bank building - we read there and looked at stereop ticon slides.

The Home for Incurables was in the red building, part of which is still standing.just south of Ellis Avenue. We went there for concerts in the garden outside.

later, Walgreen's was at 55th and Dorchester and the A and P was next door. Wolfs was the magic store, Eggers the fine grocery and Flori's did hair cuts and manicures.

Where the Bixler play lot is now. we went to Saint Thomas the Apostle School, at 57th and Kenwood.

We attended St. Thomas church at 55th and Kimbark where I was baptized and made my First Communion.

When we go down 55th Street now, 1 often think of the ghosts of those buildings. especially Greenbergs. the Frolic, Parkers, and Watsons. II

Summer/Fall 1995

continued From poge 4 citizen participation in the development of an urban renewal program. The Conference and the community were very fortunate in that Jack Meltzer, the director of the Planning Unit, wanted citizen participation just as strongly as the residents insisted upon it.

In 1956 the area was officially designated a Conservation Area and a Conservation Community Council (CCC) consisting of n residents of the community was appointed by the Mayor which for most of its years of existence was led by Edwin A Rothschild. 1he CCC is responsible for the first step in the approval process of an urban renewal plan and subsequently plays the same role for amendments to the Plan with respect to changes in property acquisition and land use designations. The HP-K CCC also undertook reviewing redevelopment proposals to make its recommendations to the city although this was not one of its legally required functions.

That same year (1956), the Preliminary Plan was completed and approved, which enabled the federal government to reserve $25,835,000 of federal money for the project. These funds would be released provided that (I) the final plan was satisfactory and

(2) the City of Chicago would provide an additional one-third of its share of the total estimated cost of

$39,500,000. 1he Preliminary Plan was then presented to the community, too.

By this time, progress had been made toward checking deterioration in the community through the efforts of the block organizations and the staffs of both the Conference and the Commission. Both organizations worked very closely on several court cases which served to enforce the single family zoning for the mansions in Central Kenwood, returning mansions previously converted into rooming houses back to single family use.

While these two organizations were fighting those particular cases in court, a group of young matrons living in the area embarked on a positive program of attracting families to purchase these large homes for single family use. The Kenwood Open House, an event where several homes were opened to the public each year for a tour, and the development of enticing brochures which were taken to large concerns in the city in an effort to attract young executives to their area, were the two major means used by the Kenwood "Ladies". Needless to say, their efforts were extremely successful. Kenwood was the earliest area within the community to stabilize and where homes are sold by whites to blacks, and by

blacks to whites in a free flow without regard to race. (1he Kenwood Open House Committee continues to meet and to serve as the watchdog for that part of the community.)

In Hyde Park itself, by 1956 block groups were so alert to watching for and reporting to the Conference any signs of illegal conversions in its many apartment buildings that it led the Building Commissioner to comment that even a stick of lumber for a bookcase could not be delivered into the area without a report being made to the Building Department. But much remained to be done to improve the maintenance of standards in apartment buildings, many of which were owned by absentee landlords. Block groups had also achieved some successes through close cooperation with the city for such services as street cleaning, garbage collection, clearing of vacant lots for playlots and the like. In many instances, they supplemented these services by doing the job themselves. 1he city's program of posting for street cleaning was born out of the posting of flyers by block groups in order to get streets and curbs cleaned.

The Planning Years - 1956-1958

When the Preliminary Plan was presented, a special "planning committee" of the Conference undertook the role of the middle man in the citizen participation program that followed. Members of this committee were residents of the community and was mostly composed oflaymen although there were a few who were professional planners. 1he members of this committee presented the proposals of the Preliminary Plan to block group meetings, got the reactions, comments, criticisms, and suggestions from the residents and relayed them to the Planning Unit. These initial meetings were often followed by block groups meeting directly with Jack Meltzer where the difficulties and problems of proposals were discussed, debated, argued and sometimes changed or modified.

Over 300 block and area meetings were held during the two years the plan was discussed in the community. There were many changes in the plan as a result of the interaction between planners and community-some were major and some minor. The people in the community were asked to look at the plan not in terms of their own property or block, but in terms of the overall community continued on poge a

Summer/Fall 1995

continued From page 7 needs and conditions-a highly difficult undertaking. By the time the discussions came to an end, those who were concerned about any proposals under the plan knew more clearly the reasoning behind them even though, regardless of the logic presented, many felt the planning was done for the direct benefit to the University and other institutions and with less regard for the community's residents.

Because discussions of the proposals in the program were held via the block group organizations, the participants in its development included residents of all economic, cultural and racial levels.

It was interesting to note that on several occasions where strong protest arose over similar proposals one of which would be in a lower income, working class, block and another in a middle class University faculty block-the arguments raised by both were identical with the only exception being the difference in their articulation of the protest but not in the feeling or the meaning.

The "final plan" was released for community discussion early in February 1958. After a month of meetings to review it at the block level, public hearings were conducted in March by the CCC. There were additional changes and modifications made and the CCC approved the plan and submitted it to the city. When the final revised plan was presented to the City Council late in 1958, it received wide community support. The City Council's Committee on Planning and Housing held its public hearings on the plan. There were 135 witnesses, go of whom were individuals or representatives of groups from within the community, who testified at the five days of hearings. Major opposition to the plan came from Msgr. John Egan representing the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and was backed from within the community by a local group of residents known as the Hyde park Tenants and Homeowners Association. Their opposition centered on the failure to provide public housing in the plan, and to secure definite commitments for new middle-income housing. The destruction of sound buildings, the prospect of displaced families being relocated into crowded neighborhoods, and the ambiguity of rehabilitation standards were also questioned. In response to some of these concerns, prior to the submission of the plan to the full City Council, a commitment was secured from the Chicago Dwellings Association to provide two million dollars of new middle-income housing. the rehabilitation

standards were clarified, and there was a reduction of clearance in the northeast comer of the community.

There was, in spite of-and in some cases because of-the vigorous opposition of the two above mentioned groups. overwhelming community and city-wide support for the plan. The Committee on Planning and Housing unanimously recommended that the City Council approve the plan with a strong recommendation that a minimum of 120 public housing units be included in implementing the program.

On November 7, 1958, the City Council approved the Hyde Park-Kenwood Urban Renewal Plan and the federal government authorized the City of Chicago to proceed with its execution in January 1959.

The Urban Renewal Plan

The urban renewal plan called for the clearance of

101 acres ofland. This was about 20% of the area excluding the land clearance project and the University's campus area. of the buildings proposed for demolition. 78% were substandard. An integral part of this project was the large scale rehabilitation program involving close to 2,4oo remaining structures.

The plan provided for expanded space around existing schools for building new plants or additions to the old ones, or for needed play space. At the time these proposals were made, schools were overcrowded, but as the population dropped in succeeding years, school expansion was not necessary in many instances. Some of the designated school sites still provide open space for the schools while others have been redesignated for other uses.

Although the community is almost surrounded by park land-Jackson Park on the east, Washington Park on the west, and the Midway on the south, there was little in the way of park and playground facilities within easy walking distance in the interior of the community. These were also provided for in the plan and except for one park/playground site, the Conference's Parks and Recreations Committee headed by Barbara Fiske, provided the vehicle for the community to participate in planning the new parks and playgrounds. John Hawkinson, a local artist. helped the committee and the block groups in designing the parks and playlots in their immediate areas through the creative use of sand boxes and

Summer/Fall 1995

simulated trees and equipment.

Shopping facilities which originally ran the length of major through streets were considered obsolete.

Along 55th Street many of the stores were vacant or had marginal uses. These were eliminated and new commercial space was provided in smaller shopping centers. Most of the displaced businesses either closed or moved out of the community. Some remained in the community and moved into existing spaces not scheduled for demolition. Several displaced businesses banded together, formed a cooperative and built the Kimbark Shopping Plaza with several of the key businesses still in

occupancy-Mr. G's, Breslauer's, Ace (Anderson's) Hardware, and Mitzie's Flowers.

Space was also provided for institutiemal expansion for churches, hospitals, private social welfare agencies, as well as for the University.

Small spot clearance areas were designated for off street parking. 1he community wanted off-street parking but it turned out that residents did not want to pay for the privilege. Therefore, most of these sites were later redesignated for other uses, usually for housing development.

1he remainder of the land cleared was for the development of about 3,000 new dwelling units. 1he Chicago Dwelling Association built its commitment of $2 million of middle income housing in the multi apartment structure housing elderly persons and families at 51st and Cottage Grove. Additional moderate/middle income family housing units were developed under special FHA insured programs including the cooperative built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union at 48th and Lake Park. The CCC adopted the Conference's recommendation that the public housing sites should be scattered and after much heated discussions and hearings, six family units were designated and built in the 56oo Dorchester block. another six in the 5mo Blackstone block, and 18 "modular" units at 50th and Blackstone. Two developments for elderly housing were built-18 units at 55th & Woodlawn and 8 units at 53rd & Woodlawn. Another 64 units of family housing is located in a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) building at 50th and Cottage Grove on land the CHA had acquired prior to the approval of the Urban Renewal Plan and was the only site of public housing built on the periphery of the community. These 120 newly constructed units were supplemented in subsequent years by public housing eligible persons and families using CHA issued Section 8 certificates

which allowed them to rent units at market rate. The eligible family or individual pays 30% of their income toward the rent and CHA pays the landlord the balance. There has been a constant danger of concentration instead of dispersal of low income households through the use Section 8.

The rehabilitation phase of the urban renewal plan was slower in getting started and did not really begin until 1964 after it was stimulated by new development on some of the cleared sites. It continued at an accelerated rate in the 70s and 8os and most often occurred when properties (single family and multi-family) changed ownership or when rental apartments were converted to condos.

As housing prices rose, more rehab took place, and areas where it was felt no change would ever occur, are even now joining the rehab/condo parade.

Officially the Urban Renewal Plan will come to a close within the next three and a half years. There are still some problems-maybe they'll be resolved by closing time or maybe they will be resolved later when renewal activities in North Kenwood-Oakland finally get underway. Nonetheless the purpose of the urban renewal program-to stimulate the physical

up-grading of the community-has certainly occurred throughout Hyde Park-Kenwood marking it a successful program.

It was not, however, just an Urban Renewal project that made the revitalization of Hyde Park Kenwood a reality. It was the in-depth involvement and participation of hundreds of its residents to make the program work. They are too numerous to name but they were blue collar workers, white collar workers, postal workers, school teachers, small business owners, government workers, executives, lawyers, University faculty, staff and students.

Leadership came from all walks of life-especially at

the block group and regional area levels.

Looking back, those were noble goals that were set some 45 years ago by the organizers of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference-to build and maintain a stable interracial community of high physical standards. To the credit of those early leaders, and the dedicated and enthusiastic involvement of the community's residents, the goal has been achieved. El

drawings by Michael McDermott photo by Alta Blakley

Summer/Fall 1995

l£gocJ TI 'oae:>g.p anuaAy ){.IBd cl)[B1·s 6z55

hapos p :>µO'.lSIH ){.IBd apAH

This Newsletter is published by the Hyde Park Historical Society, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1975 to record, preseIVe, and promote public interest in the history of Hyde Park. Its headquarters, located in an 18g3 restored cable car station at 5529 South Lake Park Avenue, houses local exhibits. It is open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays &om 2 until 4pm.

Telephone: HY3-1893

President Tom Pavelec Editor Theresa McDermott

Designer Nickie Sage

Regular membership: $15 per year, contributor. $25, sponsors: $50, benefactor. $100

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

Winter, 1995

Childhood

in Early

Hyde Park

by Helen Mat11ews Miller

Hele11 Mathews Miller has captured here life i11 old Hyde Park. We are delighted to be able to share her memories with our readers.

In 1894. my father. Shailer Mathews. left Colby College in WateIVille, Maine. where he taught history and political economy. to join the new University of Chicago being built under the Presidency of William Rainey Harper. He was Dean of the Divinity School for 25 years until his retirement in 1933. He built the three-story brick house with white trim at 5736 Woodlawn Avenue. It was said that no frame houses were permitted after the great Chicago fire of 1871. My mother joined him after the birth of their son and

the three lived in the old Del Prado Hotel on 59th and Washington. now Blackstone. while the house was being completed. It was the second house on the block. Woodlawn Avenue was unpaved; cows were pastured across the street; rats scurried under the wooden board sidewalks. and it must have seemed a dreary spot to my mother coming from her New England home. The house was equipped with both electricity and natural gas ("in case the electricity should fail"). the roof was of slate shingles brought

5736 5. Woodlawn Ave.

from Maine as were the kitchen sink and laundry tubs. The interior woodwork was all golden oak. so popular at that time. There were transoms over each bedroom door which could be dosed or opened for ventilation. and a speaking tube from the front bedroom to the kitchen through which one could send a piercing whistle to attract someone's attention for the message to follow. Two of the bedrooms had gas grates for extra warmth which gave a great "plop" when lighted and smelled faintly of gas. A chute from the 3rd floor bathroom to the basement disposed oflaundry. All the pipes in the house were of lead.

I was born in r8g8 and recently came across the bill for my delivery by Dr. Frank Carey: $75. My sister Mary arrived 4rh years later. Up to that time we had had no telephone. depending on the Quadrangle Club.

Del Prado Hotel (site of International House today)

then around the corner on 58th Street. for phone calls. With her birth imminent. it was thought wise to install our own phone to call the doctor.

The Quadrangle Club was later moved on rollers across the campus to make way for the building of the Oriental Institute, and the present club was erected at 57th St. and University Ave.

Other professors arrived and built their homes up and down Woodlawn and Lexington Avenues from 55th St. to the Midway. Soon there was quite a group of children my age on our block, all boys except Clarinda Buck and me, and all very kind, thanks to my brother. in allowing us to join in their track meets and King Arthur Tournaments. There were the Jordans, the Bucks, the Herricks, the Vincents, the Loebs (who covered their back yard with gravel because it was more sanitary than grass), the Hales and the Donaldsons. In the winter we flooded the yard for ice skating and built forts and a toboggan slide out of huge snow balls. We had "hose parties" in hot weather.

Papa was in great demand as a lecturer and preacher at colleges and churches all over the country. so he was away from home a great deal. Once I asked him if speaking even to smaller groups was worthwhile. He said, 'Yes, if I can enlarge their outlook even a little." He was never ordained as a minister, preferring to teach and write. He was the

author of some 20 or more books, among them 'Toe Social Teachings of Jesus," "Is God Emeritus," 'Toe Faith of Modernism," 'The French Revolution," and his autobiography, "New Faith for Old."

He was also very active in the Hyde Park Baptist (now "'Union") Church, was President of the Federal Council of Churches, and on the boards of the Northern Baptist Convention, University of Chicago Settlement. Chautauqua Institution and Church Peace Union, and Kobe College, Japan. He started and edited a news magazine 'The World Today." My mother, too, was busy with outside activities: the Needlework Guild of the World, Camp Farr of the U of C Settlement and Women's Society of the Baptist Church. She was a member of Mrs. George Glessner's Monday morning reading class at 18th and Prairie Avenue and of the "Once a Weeks," a group of close friends in the neighborhood and on the board of the Chicago Orphan Asylum.

Nahnally. the faculty children went to the

University Elementary and High School (being given half tuition). The school had developed from the old John Dewey School my brother attended at 58th and Ellis. I reveled in classes in art, weaving, clay modeling. woodwork and copper shop, sewing and cooking (for both girls and boys) and especially in Miss Stillwell's print shop where we set up type by hand and printed our own booklets of poems and

.....,- .

Winter 1995

Greek and Norwegian mythology, illustrating them with drawings done in our art class. There were the usual academic subjects also, starting French in the 4th grade, though American history seems to have been somewhat neglected. We were taken on field trips to the Japanese tea house on the Wooded Island and to the Indiana Sand Dunes to study bugs and weeds. We were taken to the fire station on 55th Street to see a demonstration on instantaneous response to a fire alarm and to Lake Michigan to view the three Spanish ships (the "Caravels"), reproductions of those in which Columbus sailed when he discovered America. then anchored off the land where stood la Rabida Convent, all these donated by Spain to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

One day, when I was alone in the house, I decided

to climb down the outside to the ground. I went out the window in Papa's 3rd floor study, dropped to the small balcony below, climbed over the w'ooden railing. slid down the downspout to the roof of the front porch and went over to the north end where I could climb over that railing and slide down the long post to the porch railing below. an easy jump from there to the ground, but I confess I arrived shaken. No one ever mentioned this exploit to me so I assume it was not known.

On Spring Saturday mornings. Connie Mclaughlin. Clarinda and I would climb into the low branches of

the old willow tree in the field now occupied by Ida Noyes Hall, where we read aloud "David Copperfield" as we munched gumdrops and horehound candy.

Clarinda and I sat on the back porch steps reading the endless "Green Fairy," "Blue Fairy," "Red Fairy," stories and the "little Colonel" books. She believed she was a witch because she had red hair. Carrell Mason and I were champion 'jack" players, inventing new tricks for that ancient game. She had a Shetland pony and would take me for drives around Washington Park.

Special treats were monthly concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra held in Mandel Hall, and the Fuller Sisters who sang old English songs accompanied by harpsichord and harp. Sunday afternoons the children on our block were invited to Gardner Hale's house where his mother read aloud Scott's "Ivanhoe," a little advanced for me, being four years younger than the others.

Carrell, Connie and I would wait until the workmen had left a new house just being built and then explore to see what we could find to collect, climbing up ladders and over loose boards. We specialized in acquiring drops of lead left by the plumbers and once were richly rewarded to find a whole cup oflead in the Frank Lloyd Wright house (called the Dreadnought). being built across the street.

The first theatre I ever went to was 'The Deceitful

Columbus Fleet, Jackson Park

Winter 1995

l 'ah·crsity Tower. {'n,v,'r::-ity r)( Chic•·,,,,

Mandel Hall (note the dirt road and gas light)

Dean," given by the student players 'The Blackfriars."

As a member of the University Athletic Board, Papa could get free tickets to all the games. so he. Mr. Buck. Clarinda and I attended football games in Stagg Field

and basketball games in Bartlett gymnasium.

I learned to swim in Mr. White's swimming class in the Bartlett gymnas.iµm pool. Miss Hinman conducted a social dancing class that met in our

on 59th, looking northeast towards Kimbark

Winter 1995

various homes. Once a week I rode my bicycle to my music lesson with Miss Van Hook on Rosalie Court and could finally play 'When Morning Gilds the Skies" on the piano.

For Christmas we decorated the tree with strands of popcorn and cranberries and lighted it with real candles which miraculously never caused a fire. I was usually sick with the grippe and was brought downstairs Christmas morning wrapped in blankets and full of calomel. The German band would play the old Christmas music outside each house. In the Spring the scissors sharpener man would appear, ringing his cheery bells. and the organ grinder, with his flea-ridden monkey. would arrive. I can still feel his icy little hand as he clutched my penny and doffed his cap in thanks.

When the wind blew from the northwest. the air was filled with the heavy odor of the Stockyards and we would close all our windows. But all summer the air was also filled with the beautiful strains of music from across the street as Fannv Bloomfield Zeister, the concert pianist. practiced her scales.

We had a "poor family" living on the West Side whom we gave clothes and food to, but whom we never got to know personally. Yet they served to remind us that many were less fortunate than we were and needed help. Many of our neighbors employed Mr. Riley. a private watchman. to make the rounds at night to check windows and doors, but it

was generally believed he came around only once a month to collect his modest salary. Once I tested this and strung a black thread from post to post across the front porch. It was intact the next morning. Yet no one thought it wise to dismiss him.

Our family were all members of the Hyde Park Baptist (now "Union") Church. After Sunday school and church it was good to dash home to a dinner of roast chicken and chocolate ice cream. There were often guests. a visiting preacher or foreign missionary. or two college girls, as our parents were counselors of Kelly Hall, one of the University dormitories.

Every evening Larry. the lamp lighter. would stop his horse in front of our house, lean his ladder up against the lamp post and light the gas lamp. Fire engines terrified me as the horses galloped down the street pulling the steaming engine and hook and ladder. and we were reassured only when they had passed our house. Other familiar sounds were the 'Uxtra. Uxtra" of the newsboy calling out some exciting news, and we would run out to buy a copy.

Help seemed to be plentiful; a cook and "second maid" lived in and a laundress came once a week. Miss McKenzie came Saturday mornings to shampoo our hair; Miss Helmar once in a while to sew and mend; John Halstrom shoveled snow and tended the furnace in winter and mowed the grass in summer.

We loved all the horses that delivered packages to

Marshall Field, later Stagg Field

Winter 1995

41iWWGHt

Japanese buildings on Wooded Island, Jackson Park

our door: the grocery horse. the milk wagon horse. Marshall Field's handsome pair of dappled grays. the hardware store horse and Gus Chear's horse who wore a straw hat over a wet sponge to keep him cool on his long trip from South Water Street bringing vegetables and fresh fruits. We would slip lumps of sugar into their feed bags whenever possible.

At Halloween we carved our pumpkin and put it, lighted up, in the oak tree in the back yard. The boys would sneak up to the Deke fraternity house, ring the

bell and run. If caught, they were likely to be held under a cold shower bath.

The urge to reminisce once yielded to, is difficult to stop. From my eighties, these memories reflect my deep gratitude for a childhood spent in this pleasant and stimulating neighborhood. II

illustration by Michael F. McDermott postcards from the collection of Steve Treffmon

Winter 1995

On-Going Goings-On at HPHS

Winter 1995

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1his Newsletter is published by the Hyde Park Historical Society. a not-for-profit organization founded in 1975 to record. preseive, and promote public interest in the history of Hyde Park. Its headquarters, located in an 18g3 restored cable car station at 5529 South Lake Park Avenue, houses local exhibits. It is open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 until 4pm.

Telephone: HY3-1893 President .......Tom Pavelec

Editor. Theresa McDermott

Designer Nickie Sage

Regular membership: $15 per year, contributor. $25, sponsors: $50. benefactor. $100

HydeParl< Historical Socie NEWSLETTE

Headquarters: 5529 Lake Park Avenue Open Saturday 2-4pm; Sunday 2-4pm

SPRING/SUMMER 1996

"New"

Ray School >-

(1914) I

and new

addition '-

(1996) ]

Ray School-A Brief History

This histmy. dated February 19, 1949, was written by Mrs. Leonora Root Wilson who described herself as "retired, but a teacher at Ray far45 years and seven months." She was the Arst tead1er to sta,t work in the original Ray School building known as the "South Park School". Our thanks to Rebecca

]anowitz for providing this article.

The first school in this vicinity was in the south end of the lot at the southwest comer of Monroe Ave. (now Kenwood) and 57th St. This lot was shaded by large oak trees; and the school house. which consisted of one room and a dressing room. was surrounded by beautiful lilac bushes. Pupils

came from as far as 55th St. and Cottage Grove Ave. across what was then known as "Gansel's Prairie." This little school building was later made into an attractive two story house for one of the early settlers of Hyde Park.

My father, James P. Root. was president of the board of education of the Village of Hyde Park in the pioneer days. He was very anxious that a site should be secured in this neighborhood upon which a high school could be built at some future time. Many of the board of education members laughed at him and said that such a building would never be needed in "the bush", as this section of Hyde Park continued on page 2

continued from page 1 was nicknamed. However, in due time, the northeast comer of 57th St. and Kenwood Ave. was purchased as a school site. I believe there is a clause in the deed which reads that this property must always be used for school purposes. Here was built a two story frame building, used only for primary grades, and it was called "the South Park School." It was eventually moved to the section of the south side, then known as Parkside, and was used as a community church.

In June, 1886, the new Hyde Park High School was dedicated. At that time, Mr. WILLIAM H. RAY was principal of the high school which was at the northwest comer of 50th St. and Lake Park Ave., then known as Lake Ave. Mr. Ray and Carter H. Harrison, mayor of Chicago, addressed the

audience. 1he first floor of this building was used for elementary classes, as the high school then required only the upper floors, and Mr. Ray had the supervision of them, as well.

At this time an elementary school east of the Illinois Central was greatly desired by many of the parents whose children, in order to attend school. had to cross the tracks which were not elevated until 1893. Some of the property owners seriously objected to a school house in that residential section. Mr. lewis favored the plan and two of the members of the ''buildings and grounds committee" of the Hyde Park Board of Education who agreed with him were Dr. Henry Belfield,

Street School, and a temporary two-room building, known as the "Chicken Coop", which stood at the north end of the lot at 5631 Kimbark Avenue. At the same time construction of a new Hyde Park High School began on this lot. During the Columbian Exposition of 1893, students at the Chicken Coop were entertained alternately with Viennese waltzes from the Midway and hammering from the high school.

In September. 1894. the high school pupils were in the new building. and the former high school building on Kenwood, remodeled for elementary classes, was named the 'William H. Ray School".

Mr. William H. laWTence was the first principal of the school, and also of the "Ray Branch", formerly

then president of the Chicago Manual Training School. and my oldest brother, Frederick K. Root.

L-.:==:=:================----- !_J.;,

Old Ray School

In the summer of 1889, Hyde Park Village was annexed to the City of Chicago. Mr. Ray died in July of that year, and one of the teachers, William McAndrew, became principal of the high school. The elementary classes then acquired a separate supervisor, Miss Hattie A Burts, who had been principal of another Hyde Park elementary school, known as the Fifty-fourth Street School.

By 1892, the rapidly increasing high school enrollment made it necessary to find other quarters for the elementary pupils using the Kenwood Avenue building. These students were dispersed to three schools: Jackson Park School (on Fifty-sixth Street just east of the Illinois Central Tracks, the site of the present Bret Harte School), the Fifty-fourth

the Jackson Park School. In his fifteen years as principal. Mr. laWTence established the remarkable spirit ofloyalty and friendship among his teachers which has persisted at Ray, and his death in July. 1910, was felt as a great loss in the community.

Mr. Arthur 0. Rape, principal from 1910-1930, supervised the transfer of the Ray School from its first location to the present address. Again the high school needed more room, and after the completion of the present Hyde Park High School at Sixty second Street and Stony Island Avenue, the old building on Kimbark was remodeled for an elementary school. On Friday, March 13, 1914, principal. teachers, pupils, and name moved to the present Ray School site. 9

Spring/Summer 1996

Did you know?...

'--- --"'-- ------ ------- --- ------------=-....:_JQ.

In July, 1916, Father Thomas Vincent Shannon was appointed pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle Parish. " ... his examination of the old parish school had convinced him that it wouldn't do. Fortunately, the old Ray Public School, three blocks away at Kenwood and

57th Street, was vacant. Father Shannon rented it and had a great semicircular sign placed over the doorway:

School of St. Thomas the Apostle.

When the school opened in September, 486 children were enrolled... the number of sisters was increased from six to twelve.

Uniforms were introduced-military for the boys (America was nearing her entry into World War I) and simple dresses for the girls. The children were proud of their uniforms... it gave a fine sense of democracy to the youngsters to find that they were all dressed alike, and that no one knew who was poor or who was rich." (from Centennial History of St. Thomas, 1969)

The old Ray Schoof was used by St. Thomas until 1929, when a new parish school building was completed.

THE NEW BUILDING

C.W. French, Principal

from the Hyde Park High School yearbook, 1893

Although the new high school building is not yet visible to the naked eye, it is by no means a "Castle in the Air." Toe necessity for it is obvious and pressing, and the delay in commencing work will, no doubt. be a short one.

It will be located on the east side of Kimbark avenue, between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh streets, and will be complete in every particular. lhe details of the building cannot yet be definitely given, but its general features will be much as follows:

lhere will be two floors above the basement, with a large hall, forming a third. story, which will be large enough for all the public exercises of the school. A gymnasium, with a hardwood floor, will occupy a part of the basement and first story. lhere will be three laboratories, especially fitted for biology,

chemistry and physics, with all the necessary apparatus.

Another important feature will be a large art room. arranged for both mechanical and freehand drawing.

Instead of the old assembly room system, the pupils will be seated in class rooms, each room accommodating about fifty, while the whole building will have a seating capacity of 1,000, nearly double that of the present building. lhe ground plan will be so large that all the work can be done on two floors, thus doing away with the necessity of so much passing up and down stairs, an advantage that will be highly appreciated.

Toe old building is the center of many hallowed associations, and its walls are redolent with sweet memories of past joys and triumphs. Yet it is hoped that the new building may receive as its inheritance the successes of the old, and that it may maintain the

honorable reputation which the past has established. Bl

Spring/Summer 1996

Cornell Awards 1996

.I To the Parish of St. Thomas the Apostle for the restoration of the church's terracotta tower which had been badly damaged by lightning some

years ago. The process required taking apart the uninjured tower, shipping the pieces to a firm in California where molds were made from those pieces, new terra cotta formed in those molds, and all shipped back to Chicago and assembled again. Dorothy Perrin, Chairman of the Art & Environment Committee at St. Thomas accepted the award from Board Member Devereux Bowly.

Washington

Park

Refectory

Spring/Surnrne 1 99 6

• To the Public Building Commission of Chicago for the restoration of, and the addition to, the William H. Ray School both of which have been done with thoughtful and appropriate care-the replacement of the multi-paned windows, the roof and tuck pointing and the new addition. Chris Hill, Executive Director of the Public Buildings Commission, Adela Cepeda, Commissioner, and Cydney Fields, Principal of Ray School, accept the award.

• To the Architectural Firm of Hasbrouck, Peterson, Zimoch and Siriratturnrong for providing the research for the restoration of the Washington Park Refectory. Architect Wilbert Hasbrouck in accepting the award told us that the cost of restoring this wonderful building was far less than tearing it down and building another.

Award winner's photos: Nancy Hays

Spring/Summer 1996

by Stephen A. Treffman

We have a tendency, sometimes, to assume that whatever was in place when and where we grew up had always been there or at least been there first. The remarkable new addition to the William Ray Elementary School stands on what was, for many years, the school's south playground. It is not an uncommon belief among Hyde Parkers that the playground must date to the same time that the school itself was built in 18g3. As this photographic postcard

coop" and some ancillary structures, which stood almost directly across from 5630 S. Kimbark, had to be removed. Finally, stretching across the south end of tl1e block from the comer of Kimbark east to the alley were seven brick buildings, probably of mixed residential and commercial use.

Within a few years of this photograph, major changes were occurring in and around the school. The school population of Hyde Park and its surrounding neighborhoods had grown beyond the numbers that could be accommodated comfortably by a

PLAYGROUND MEMOR E S

from 1910 clearly indicates, however, that was not the case; homes occupied the land that later would become the school's south and north playgrounds. In fact. at least by 18gJ, the half-block on which, three years later, the school would be built, was already well along in its residential and commercial development.

Homes and businesses could be found on iliree sides of ilie half-block area; the fourth side was an alley iliat split the block from nortl1 to south, a portion of which still exists. Six houses, most built in the 18&:Js, lined ilie north end of the half-block, where the primary class building now stands. Around the comer, on the east side of Kimbark Avenue, there were single family homes at 5611, 56r7, 5619, 5621 and 5647. At least some of these appear in the photograph. When the school was constructed, apparently only the "chicken

configuration of public schools iliat reflected conditions of a much earlier period. Reflecting Hyde Park's dramatic population growth, its school emollment rose from 76oo in 1gx, to 27,000 in 1912. Similar growth was occurring in Kenwood and Woodlawn, as it was throughout the city itself. Indeed, Chicago's population rose fifty percent from 1gx, to 1914. (Report of the Chicago Tmction and Subway Commission, Chicago: 1916) A new Hyde Park High School was built and opened in 1913 at 62nd and Stony Island Avenue. Students from the school on Kimbark transferred to ilie new high school. Students in ilie old Ray elementary school, pictured elsewhere in iliis issue, were shifted to the high school, which became the Ray School that we know today.

Progressive educational practices of the time called for

Spring/Summer 1996

young children to have opportunities to develop healthy bodies through outdoor play and recreation, hence, the need for elementary school playgrounds. Thus, as plans progressed to transform the old high school into an elementary school, establishing playgrounds for its students would have been one of the priorities. County records indicate that, by 1912, the Chicago Public Schools had begun condemnation proceedings against the East 57th Street buildings and probably all of the homes on the Ray School block. as well.

Changes in location of just one of those 57th Street businesses can be useful in suggesting to timetable for creation of, at least, the south playground. In the 18gos, Thomas A Hewitt opened a bookstore in one of those brick buildings on 57th. In 1 5. Hewitt, in partnership now with Vernon A Woodworth, moved the store a few doors west, to the larger and more prominent comer lot at 1302 E. 57th Street, apparently confident in the stability of that move. In early 1913, however, a building permit was issued to Woodworth, by then sole owner of the business, allowing construction across the street of the three story building that still stands at 1311 E. 57th. 1he building that housed the old store was demolished on April 24, 1914. It is likely that at about the same time, all of the houses along the Ray School block were razed or otherwise removed from their lots. It would appear, then, that the year in which that land, at least at the south end of the school. was converted into a playground was 1914, twenty-one years after the school itself was built.

Memories of the homes and stores that once were

there have long faded. Woodworth's book and school supplies store, however, remained in business in the building he had constructed, until it closed in 1972. Joseph O'Gara's bookstore then took over the space until recently, when he moved to new quarters two blocks east on 57th. Tracing the historical lineage of their business to Hewitt and Woodworth, O'Gara and his partner Douglas Wilson now lay claim to ownership of the oldest continuously operating bookstore in Chicago.

1he playground, where some of the defining events in the history of our community took place and, as well, in the lives of generations of many of its children, has now itself become a memory.

Envisioning those scenes again is made more difficult in the context of what is now so expansively new.

Sometime soon, young children will walk into the new school addition and have no awareness of the playground that so long existed there. A new cycle of memories will begin. Most everywhere one looks in Hyde Park, layers of its history abound that, once

uncovered, challenge our perceptions of its past as well as of our own. a

f R oses at the t

Columbian Exposition

The Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago, May 1, 1893.

This was the first World's Fair held in the United States where gardening, horticulture and the florist industry had a prominent part.

John Thorpe was in charge of the flower displays. He challenged the Americans to show that they could produce equal or better quality than the foreigners. "It was to be the greatest aggregation of beauty, that has ever been seen in the United States," he said. Indoor exhibits would cover

about 61/2 acres, and 17 acres were to be devoted to

outdoor gardens.

Planting the rose garden began a year before the fair opened. Since cold storage was not available, some of the stock, shipped in from California was completely buried until it could be planted. Thirty men were on hand working with wagons, wheelbarrows, spades, etc. to plant the roses.

In June, 1893, the rose garden was in full bloom and apparently filled those who saw it with ecstasy. One reporter wrote: "One standing in this beautiful bower of roses could imagine himself in the famed Vale of Cashmere.

To be there in early morning when dew glistens on the

rose's cheeks, like diamonds on a queen at a ball, is enough to bring forth from the most indifferent breast, an exclamation of pleasure."

The rose garden covered about an acre and was said to have been planted in a very attractive design. Many other plants were used with the roses. Honeysuckles were planted around the edge of all the rose beds. One gentleman wrote that honeysuckles and roses were "chum flowers" and, in addition to providing a profusion of contrasting bloom, the honeysuckles would shade the roses from the scorching sun. Mr. Thorpe collected Phlox bifida from nearby fields and planted it around the rose beds so that it appeared "like delicate lace on a rose embroidered pillow."

The growth and bloom quality were apparently so fine that one florist shop owner was said to have "cast wicked glances" while visiting the garden. The plants from California outdid all others. They had been budded on a wild rose from China instead of the usual Mancetti used for greenhouse roses.

Very little can be seen today of where the Exposition was located on the south side of Chicago. A few buildings were retained, and one of the most prominent is now the Museum of Science. Some of the land, perhaps where the rose garden was located, is now Jackson Park.

-American Rose Society, October, 1990

Spring/Summer 1996

Waere grateful to HPHS Board Member Carol Bradford

for this portrait ofWilliam Henry Ray:

'His hearty presence. his merry laugh. his keen eye. the strong. clear tones ofhis voice - all these a re with us. but these are not the man. and when they have grown dim and faint. there shall still remain clear and shining in our hearts the character and soul, that elusive spiritual essence. which no pen can describe. but which never loses its power and individuality.While he lived hearts loved him. weak spirits trusted him. strong souls recognized him, the world about him felt his power. Now that he is gone. it remains only to put into words, this love and recognition, and to leave the record for those who knew him not:

'Mr. Ray was a man who was possessed, like most men. of certain eccentricities, to which one had to become accustomed: but he grew immensely upon his pupils and upon the community. and the esteem in which he came to be held was well witnessed at the time ofhis death:

·wehave recorded but one death - W.H. Ray - Yonder memorial window is not more beautiful than the life it commemorates. both beautiful in service.We miss him everywhere. so do multitudes ofothers, but the master had need of such a finished workman to build up the everlasting kingdom:

Though today most Hyde Parkers know nothing about the man for whom the school was named, it is

clear from the tributes at the time of his death that he was a man who had made a great impact on the community in the relatively short period of years when he lived here. The records of the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church state that 700 people attended his memorial service on September 8. 1889.

Mr. Ray was born in a small New England village. His father was a minister who had been raised on a farm and then attended Dartmouth College and Andover Seminary.

Tlie boy William grew up in nan-ow surroundings and in the midst ofhard work; but having always about him the atmosphere of a genuine home, where love for good and high things prevailed; where tender hearts and their aspirations were cherished and encouraged, where strict integrity and uprigl,tness were the nile. and where Christian courtesy and gentleness softened and brightened all the home life:

WHO WAS

WILLIAM HENRY RAY?

He studied first under his father's tutelage, then at an academy at New Ipswich, New Hampshire. and then at Dartmouth College in 1873. He worked as a teacher while in college to help meet his expenses. He graduated in 1878, then was a teacher in Mt.

Vernon, NY, Yonkers, NY, and Waukegan, IL before coming to Hyde Park in 1883.

·rntellectually. Mr. Ray was a bright. keen. original thinker, with a mind of unusual activity and force.He possessed to a marked degree the genius for hard work, and in addition to his school work. was daily occupied with book reviews and articles for educational Jou mals and associations.

·whathe had to say upon educational topics was listened to by the world of sc110ols and teachers as coming from one who spoke with authority. From his experience in the class room. he deduced p1i11ciples and suggested methods worthy of wide application. His power as an instructor was great and unusual. To sit for an hour in his class room was an education and an inspiration to an ordinary teacher.

• ...Moreover his great. wa,m heart took in every boy and girl in school. and made each feel sooner or later that he had an especial interest in him. And such an interest he had indeed. for he was never so busy or hurried as not to give a word of truth to the seeking mind. of encouragement to the disheartened. of advice to the perplexed. of

Spri11g/Summer 1996

sympathy to the lonely. No amount of trouble was too great for him to take in the endeavor to be of service to someone who needed it He never held himself away from his pupils.His presence was sunshine and brisk fresh air in the school room....:

William H. Ray and his wife Martha H. Ray joined the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church on February 29, 1884, by transfer from the First Presbyterian church of Waukegan. They had a baby boy, Duncan, who was born April 4, 1884, and baptized at the Hyde Park church on November 2, 1884. This child died on August 29, 1885 and is buried at Oak Woods

Cemetery. They also had a daughter Margaret, who was born December 16, 1887 and lived to adulthood. She was confirmed and received into full communion at the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church on December 2, 1896. 1he family lived at 5316 S. Jefferson (now Harper). He was principal of the Hyde Park High School and the assistant Superintendent of the Sabbath School of Hyde Park Presbyterian Church. He was a trustee of the church in 1889 when the present building was constructed on the comer of 53rd Street and Blackstone Avenue. After his death on July 3, 1889, the students in the Sabbath School raised the money to install a

memorial window in his honor in the fellowship hall

of the church. 1he window is inscribed with his name and the simple motto ·service·.

Mrs. Ray remained in Hyde Park until the early 1goo·s. Her name appears in a church directory of 1goo, residing at 5312 Madison (Dorchester). She is not listed in the next available directory, dated 1go4.

Mr. Ray, his wife, and infant son, Duncan, are buried at Oak Woods Cemetery, in a plot on Magnolia Road not far from the grave site of Mayor Harold Washington. £1

Sources:

Arms, Charles H. 'Annual Report, Superintendent of Sabbath School: Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, April r. 18go.

Gilchrist. Mrs. J. F. 'Historical Address: Fiftieth Anniversa , Hyde Park Presbyterian Church, 1910.

'History of the Hyde Park High School: Yearbook of Hyde Park High School, 1893.

Registry of Members. Hyde Park Presbyterian Church.

Thurston, Charlotte S. 'In Memory of William Henry

Ray: Yearbook of the Hyde Park High School, 18g3.

The HPHS Most Historic Member:

Ida De Pencier celebrating her 103rd birthday as Bea Boehm presents corsage.

Spring/Summer 1996

Notes from the Archives

by Stephen A. Treffman

A Search for 1900.

The Special Collections department of Regenstein Library has presented an exhibit entitled. "1goo: Books from the Collection of Robert Rosenthal." Mr. Rosenthal Special Collections' curator from 1953 until his death in 1g89, played a central role in shaping its direction. especially during the critical period of its organization and development in Regenstein. In 1975. Mr.

Rosenthal and two close friends decided to

assemble a collection of books and other printed material bearing the imprint of the year rgcx:>.

Over time, however, his friends tired of their quest but Mr. Rosenthal steadfastly carried on. He succeeded in amassing a fascinating collection oflargely American artifacts printed at

.;;

the last tum-of-the-century. The Rosenthal exhibit has recently closed.

Our Society owes a profound debt of gratitude to Mr. Rosenthal whose encouragement and support of the late Jean Block led to the establishment of our archives in Special Collections. The exhibit of his books offered us an opportunity to acknowledge that debt by sharing something that bears a relationship to the subject of his collection. This unusual postcard not only has a Hyde Park connection but was mailed from Chicago on January r, Igcx:>. On its face is a stylish view of the German Building, that smvivor of the Columbian World's Exposition which stood at 57th Street and the Lake. By rgcx:>, it had already become a popular restaurant, as well as a Chicago landmark. The card with its loving New Year greeting is addressed to Miss Helena Wening in Numburg, Germany from her sister Betty and postmarked received at its destination on January 12. II

0a.

THIS SIDE IS EXCLU OR lHE ESS,

Spring/Summer 1996

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor:

The winter newsletter is really superb. of course, they all are, but this one. enhanced with Michael's drawings and Steve's post cards, is truly one to keep.

Because it is such a significant addition to our knowledge of early Hyde Park days. I think it might be appropriate to footnote Mrs. Miller's memo1ies with a couple of corrections. We can't change what she remembered-nor do we want to!- but, for the record-the Monday morning reading class was that of Mrs. John Glessner.

George was her son. That is, her husband was John Jacob Glessner, called John. and her son was John George, called George.

The Mason girl was Carroll-afterward. Carroll Mason Russell. Probably her young friends never knew the odd spelling of her name. And the pianist was Fanny Bloomfield Zeisler.

Alice Schlessinger

To the Editon

Yes, indeed I enjoyed your printed article in Historical Society paper.

It was in fact read aloud to the members of this nursing home, who seemed to enjoy tales of my early childhood-which at my 97 years are a bit earlier than theirs. I still regret the omission of my father's house in the Houses ofHyde Park book I find your R.H. Society very interesting and would enjoy an issue once in a while if possible.

<PleaseJoin

Vs ...

WE HAVE RESCHEDULED THE TALK BY SAM GUARD ON THE WORK DONE FOR ST. THOMAS THE APOSTLE CHURCH BY SCULPTOR ALFONSO IANNELLI.

IANNELLI WORKED WITH FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT ON THE MIDWAY GARDENS, AND LATER WITH BARRY BYRNE, THE ARCHITECT OF ST. THOMAS.

Helen Mathews Miller

Our thanks to Alice and to Helen Matthews Miller whose memories of Hyde Park were recounted in our winter newsletter. Please write to us when you have something to add to our history.

THIS ILLUSTRATED LECTURE WILL BE GIVEN AT ST. THOMAS,

IN THE CHAPEL.

SATURDAY., IUNE 22.. AT 2·00PM 5472 SOUTH KIMBARK

Spring/Summer 1996

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This Newsletter is published by the Hyde Park Historical Society, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1975 to record, preserve. and promote public interest in the history of Hyde Park. Its headquarters, located in an 18g3 restored cable car stabon at 5529 South lake Park Avenue, houses local exhibits. It is open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 unbl 4pm.

Telephone: HY3-1893

President Tom Pavelec Editor Theresa McDermott

Designer Nickie Sage

Regular membership: $15 per year, contributor. $25, sponsors: $50, benefactor: $100

VOLUME 18

ePar •

THE

COLLAPSIBLE COLISEUM

AND THE

CROSS OF GOLD

BY JAMES STRONKS

In the summer of 1895 "The Greatest Building on Earth" (so said the flag on its roof) was going up on 63d Street, a block west of Stony Island Avenue.

Inland Architect said "The Coliseum" was the biggest building erected in America since the Columbian Exposition, and its statistics were indeed awesome.

Longer than two football fields, it covered 51/2 acres of floor space and would seat 20,000 easily. Eleven enormous cantilever trusses spanned 218 feet of airspace, enclosing nearly a city block. A tower twenty stories high would dominate the neighborhood, its elevators rising to an observatory/cafe, with a roof-garden music-hall atop that, and at the pinnacle a giant electric searchlight visible for miles.

The Coliseum's mammoth steel skeleton was all but completed ...and then it happened.

At 11:10 p.m. on August 21 the immense framework collapsed. The appalling roar scared people off a standing train as far away as 47th Street.

At dawn the next morning engineers with long faces inspected the ruins to determine the cause. Newspaper reporters licked their pencil points, eager to pin blame and expose a scandal. But there really wasn't any. The collapse was evidently caused by some 75 tons of lumber having been stacked on the roof so as to bear too heavily upon the last truss put into place, one which was not yet completely bolted into the structure as a whole. There was no scandal in the design, declared American Architect and Building News (Boston): "Both architect and engineer bear names of the best repute in the country." Just the same, it did not name them. continued on page 2

But with 600 men working three shifts the Coliseum could be finished in 80 or 90 days, in time for a football game scheduled there for Thanksgiving Day.

The Coliseum occupied the block just west of where Hyde Park High School stands today, between 62d and 63d Streets. Thus it stood exactly where Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show had ripped and roared during the world's fair in 1893. On the east and west it was bounded by Grace and Hope, interesting street names (they have been given confusing new ones lately), but the entrance to the Coliseum, as shown in our Harper's Weekly picture, was on 63d Street.

Steel Skeleton

conlinued from page I The engineer of the steelwork was in fact Carl Binder and the architect was S.S. Beman.

Solon S. Bemen, age 42, had designed the Pullman Building in his twenties, planned the whole village of Pullman, built the Studebaker-Fine Arts, the Washington Park Club at the racetrack, the Grand Central Station on Harrison at Wells, and the Mines and Mining Building at the world's fair. In Hyde Park/Kenwood, Beman designed Blackstone Library, the Bryson Apartments, Christ Scientist churches on Dorchester and Blackstone, eight or

ten private homes, and supervised the Rosalie Villas project (Harper between 57th and 59th). He himself lived on East 49th, moving later to

5502 Hyde Park Boulevard.

Of the collapsed Coliseum Beman spoke with authority. There was no doubt as to the correctness" of engineer Binder's steelwork, and construction would

resume with no change in

design as soon as new steel s..s aeman

could be delivered. Barnum and

Bailey's Circus, booked there for October, would have to be cancelled, as would a fat stock and horse show.

The Coliseum's tower gives the historian a problem. It has been so badly drawn in our Harperls picture as to be quite false---S.S. Beman could never have designed that thing. Was it added by a different hand when the sketch was mailed to the editors in New York?

Conceivably the $75,000 loss on the collapsed steelwork forced the Coliseum Company to curtail Beman's elaborate concept for the tower. But that there was finally a tower is suggested by the name given to the Tower Theatre, built on the identical spot after the death of the Coliseum. Old Hyde Parkers will remember a small steel latticework "tower" playfully capping the facade of the Tower Theatre as late as 1950.

Curiously, "The Greatest Building on Earth" is quite unknown today, and has apparently never had its story told before. A recent fat scholarly history of Chicago architecture from 1872 to 1922 knows nothing of it. Not even an authoritative 1985 study of Beman 's total work (which cites more than 100 of his buildings, including commercial projects) reveals any

Au1umn I 9 9 6

awareness of his mighty Coliseum. The reason must be its brief life. It rose, it fell, it rose again, it burned down-all in little more than two years. Sic transit gloria mundi. But before it died in flames, The Coliseum enjoyed one splendid moment of national fame.

That big moment came on July 7-11, 1896, when The Coliseum staged the Democratic National Convention, where William Jennings Bryan, age 36, made his famous Cross of Gold speech and was nominated for President of the United States.

The Chicago Tribune called the Coliseum arrangements "a grand success." Harper's Weekly compared The Coliseum to Madison Square Garden in New York, pronounced it typical of Chicago in its hugeness, and scoffed that no speaker could ever possibly be heard by all 20,000 sitting in that vast hall.

As for convention politicking, a headline declared it a horse race:

LEADERS ALL AT SEA.

No Certainty As To Probable Nominee. Chicago papers printed dozens of portraits and

Architect's Original Plan

cartoons of prominent Democrats. They ran reams of interviews with the leading candidates. But none of the portraits or cartoons or write-ups were about young William Jennings Bryan from Nebraska. That would change on the third day when the convention bosses let him speak.

The Cross of Gold was not a keynote speech, nor nominating or acceptance speech. Its purpose was to "conclude debate on the platform." It concluded it, all right. Bryan actually spoke about only one plank in the platform, the silver plank, but with it he ran away with the convention. It was like a classic myth, the one where the handsome young idealist from the provinces wins out over the old professional courtiers and is crowned prince.

The Democrats in 1896, at least the dominant faction who engineered a plurality at the convention, were calling for the free, unlimited coinage of silver by the U.S. Mint at a ratio of 16 to 1 with gold. "We demand," said the platform "that the standard silver dollar be full legal tender, equally with gold, for all debts, public and private." It does not sound radical to us today, but in 1896 it was to many good people a shocking inflationary proposal to continued on poge 4

Autumn r 9 9 6

continued from poge 3 subvert a sacred gold standard. Some pro-gold, "sound-money" Democrats walked out and formed a splinter party.

In the severe depression of 1893-1894 there was a shortage of money in circulation. Bryan and other silverires in the agricultural West and South-for it was very much a sectional cause-believed that unlimited coining of silver would increase the money supply and thus ease the suffering of farmers and workingmen and small businessmen slipping toward bankruptcy.

It was a simplistic argument, no doubt-that Free Silver could cure complex economic ills, and social ones rising our of them. Bur by the summer of 1896 Free Silver had acquired a powerful appeal to the debtor class, and in his speech Bryan milked it to the maximum. He himself was sincere in feeling it nothing less than a holy cause.

I have lately read the Cross of Gold speech-it seemed the least I could do for this paper--expecting to be bored. Instead I found it fascinating: ardent in emotion, rich in striking metaphors, a masterpiece of old-fashioned populist oratory. No wonder its dramatic rhythms raised pulses in the Coliseum on July 9, 1896, when spoken out in Bryan's wonderful voice, with masterful timing and inflection, and

Byran 'The Silver Knight of the West" in 1896

clearly audible to all 20,000 in that enormous hall. (One marvels, since most Hyde Park ministers need a microphone to reach 50 listeners.)

That the Cross of Gold speech was nor to be a technical discourse on monetary policy was evident at once in Bryan's throbbing opener:

The humblest citizen in all the land,

when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.

One cannot imagine Mr. Clinton or Mr. Dole trying to get away with that kind of language in 1996. But the transcript of the Cross of Gold speech which appeared in newspapers all over America the next day tells us of constant interruptions by applause from a thrilled audience. Bryan's listeners were soon rising to their feet to shout approval at nearly every other sentence of his attack on the bankers and gold standard capitalist money-centers of the East.

Bur it was Bryan's pro-silver finale that really set off

the fireworks. It has been a fixture in American folklore ever since:

We have petitioned [said Bryan]

and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated,

and our entreaties

have been disregarded; we have begged,-

and they have mocked

when our calamity came.

We beg no longer;

we entreat no more;

we petition no more.

We defy them .. !

We will answer their demand for a gold standard

by saying to them:

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor

this crown of thorns,

you shall not [with outstretched arms] crucify mankind

upon a cross of gold.

Seconds later The Coliseum erupted in roaring delirium. Most accounts say the demonstration lasted nearly an hour. The Tribune reporter said fifteen minutes, bur then he objected to Bryan's "profane" last sentence, and besides, the Trib was a Republican paper and was supporting McKinley. The reporter for The Record, none other than young George Ade, another Republican, confided later that, "I didn't believe one word of thar'Cross of Gold' oratorical paroxysm, but it gave me the goose-pimples just the same."

Autumn I g g 6

WILLIAM JE, NI GS BAYA

;IEXTRA EXTRA A EXTRA Fl'T

Byran, "The Boy Orator of the Platte," never much of an intellectual, had featured emotion over reason, and style over substance. Indeed, during the sustained tumult Governor Altgeld said to the man next to him, "I have been thinking over the speech. What did he say, anyhow?" And Clarence Darrow replied, "I don't know." Later, Senator Foraker, an old-guard Republican, made the wicked quip that in Nebraska the Platte River is "one inch deep and six miles wide at the mouth."

But in the Coliseum at the time, Bryan's speech was a sensational triumph, which swept the Democrats into an ecstasy of jubilation and made Bryan an instant national figure. Newspapers the next day showed him being carried on delegates' shoulders-"as if he had been a god," wrote Edgar Lee Masters. When Bryan could get away from the pressure cooker in The Coliseum, he and his young wife rode the El back to their Loop hotel, the modest Clifton House, where reporters again swarmed about him relentlessly. Bryan

did not even attend the convention the next day when the delegates nominated him, at age 36, the youngest candidate for President in history.

The campaign of 1896 was a bitter one. To admiring throngs who turned out for Bryan's appearances, wrote Professor Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, Bryan seemed "a sort of knight-errant going about to redress the wrongs of a nation." But readers today would scarcely believe the apoplectic vituperation which gold standard advocates and

G.O.P. papers showered on Bryan and Free Silver.

In November he lost to McKinley 46% to 51% of the popular vote. He was nominated again in 1900, and (with Adlai E. Stevenson as veep) lost to McKinley again. A third time, in 1908, he lost to Taft.

Bryan and Free Silver and the unlucky Coliseum itself had seen their finest hour that day 100 summers ago down on 63d Street. Iii

Autumn I 9 9 6

Notes from the Archives

by Stephen A. Treffman,

HPHS Archivist

The Hyde Park Historical Society has, over time, acquired for its archives a variety of older small artifacts and memorabilia from various businesses and other groups that once were or are still active in and around Hyde Park.

Among these have been such items as a miniature barrel bank from the University State Bank, a tape measure from the Acme Sheet Metal Works, a measuring glass from R.S. Thomas' Prescription Laboratory, a match book from the Quadrangle Club, a 45 rpm record of piano music entitled "An Evening at Morton's," postcards, offering brochures for various real estate projects, and even stationary from the Woodlawn Businessmen's Association. If you would like to donate any older items imprinted with the names of businesses, clubs, groups or organizations in Hyde Park, we would be delighted to evaluate them for inclusion in our collection.

We also maintain a small collection of political memorabilia, primarily candidate pins, from various Hyde Park campaigns. Here again, if you have any items that you think might be appropriate for our archives, please write us a note or drop off donations enclosed in an envelope or other package at our headquarters at 5529 S. Lake Park Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637.

Autumn I 9 9 6

Letters to the Editor

NEAR 47TH STRl:.£T ANO 0RE:.XE.L BOULEVARD

The following note from Len Despres was written on the card above:

June 10, 1996

The accounts of the Ray School and William Ray are excellent. Some day someone might want to unravel the mystery of the "Skee Slide" at 47th and Drexel. Did it ever exist?

The photo below, from a book titled Chicago and its Makers, by Paul Gilbert and Charles Lee Bryson, published in 1929, seems to prove it did exist at 44th, not 47th, and Drexel. Too bad we've given up such local amenities!

Autumn I 9 9 6

To the Editor:

I was very interested in your article on the Ray Schools in Spring/Summer issue. My mother and father were classmates at the original building-the St. Thomas the Apostle more recently. They would have been married, had they survived, for 96 years last June 8th.

In their class was one Matthew Brush-later to make millions on the short side of the stock market in 1931-35. My mother's maiden name being Hair their classmates took great joy and every opportunity to introduce Mr. Brush to Miss Hair.

I was born and brought up in Hyde Park. Our first home after I married was at S721 Kimbark where we lived on the third floor for several years and brought our first child home from the old Sc. Luke's Hospital in 1937.

We all miss Jean Friedberg Block.

Sincerely, Haward Lewis

Spanish Fort, Alabama

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A FlC.t-l'r' ON THE TWENTY-FIVE-YARD LINE.

CHICAGO VS. MICHIGAN IN THE COLISEUM, THANKSGMNG DAY, 1896

From the Chicago Inter-Ocean

Alonzo Stagg, Sophon,ore Herschberger, and Maroon Football

in the Coliseum

BY JIM STRONKS

"Hammill and Firth tackled like fiends, Roby and Mortimer held their places like stone walls. Tooker and Webb stood up bravely, and Cavanaugh was a team in himself. Gardner, the Clarkes, Gale, Neel, and Coy kept up the gait, and not a single fault was to be found with their work."

n 1896, one hundred seasons • ago, an underdog University of

Chicago football team played Michigan, not on Marshall Field at Ellis and 57th Street, but in the mammoth new Coliseum on East 63rd Street, a block west of Stony Island Avenue. (See our

last number.) It may have been the first indoor game ever played on a regulation field, which Walter Camp's Football (1896) tells us was then 330 feet by 160. Chicago had played indoors during the winter of 1893/94 on the tanbark in Tactersall 's Riding Academy (Wabash between 16th

and 17th), but that arena was only 2/3 of a field and play was limited to three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust.

Chicago newspapers (which are our

Coliseum (even before it was built), was a venturesome and original football man. Ivan Kaye, in Good Clean Violence: A History of College Football, calls Stagg the most inventive coach of the era, one who pioneered in such other innovations as the reverse, the lateral, the man-in motion, unbalanced lines, backfield shifts, cross blocking, and unorthodox defenses.

But who would want to play Michigan, indoors or out? Chicago had lost to Michigan in 1892, 1894, and 1895, the last game by 12-0 under atrocious winter conditions. The Chicago Times-Herald had jeered then that, "the young men who wear the maroon went down before the Michigan giants like dead thistles in the wind." Now in 1896 Chicago had had a decent season but had proven themselves beatable, having lost to Wisconsin by 24 points and

once to Northwestern by 40 (a game which Stagg remembered with pain decades later as being "humiliated by the Methodists"). In the Loop there was some betting chat the Maroons could not score a point

on Michigan.

At the brand-new University of Chicago, 1896 was only the fourth year into Scagg's football program. He had to build his team out of whoever walked onto the practice field the first week of the season. (In 1896 one walk-on was a boy from Hyde Park High

School named Hammill, who .,., played right end.) The squad was light and lacked offensive talent, f

but was blessed with an outstanding punter named Herschberger, so t

Professor Stagg (as papers sometimes (l

sources here, together with the Stagg Papers

at Regenstein Library) were curious about the

Amos Alom.o Stagg

called him, amused chat he had tenure) fashioned his '96 eleven primarily as a defensive

game and gave it a lot of space:

CHICAGO AND MICHIGAN WILL MEET AT THE COLISEUM.

Crowds Will View Novel Contest. ANN ARBOR'S MEN ARE HEAVIER.

Maroons Are Lighter and Have Few Good Substitutes.

It would be an oddity, playing the game in the warm dry windless Coliseum instead of in cold wind, rain, mud, and icy slush as God intended. But Chicago's coach, Amos Alonzo Stagg, age 34, who had booked the

team. Each man played the whole sixty minutes, of course, both offense and defense, often without a single substitute being put into the game, and also without helmets or ocher protection except the nose, ear, and shin guards visible in our newspaper picture.

As for the players' weight, let us consult the yearbook Cap and Gown (1895), which could not spell very well but which gives reliable-sounding stats for the 1894 team. We must first eliminate half a dozen ringers, men aged 27-30 and averaging 175 pounds who were probably not bona fide undergraduates and who did not play in 1896. Of the remaining bona fides in 1894, five who would play against Michigan in 1896 averaged 19.8 years of age, 5'9" and 154. By the time

w n t e r I 9 9 6

they played the Coliseum game in 1896 these young men were two years more mature physically.

As for halfback kicker Herschberger, the hero of our story here, he was an 18-year-old freshman in 1894, standing 5'7" and weighing 142. He did not return to college the next year because his mother feared he would be hurt playing football. He did return as a 20- year-old sophomore in 1896, no doubt taller and heavier, and by 1897 the Trib11ne said he was 5'91h" and

156. His weight mattered because as his team's most valuable player he was the one the opposition players tried hardest to injure.

Four days before the 1896 Michigan game Chicago scrimmaged against Michigan-style running plays:

STAGG HARD AT WORK.

Maroon Tearn Has a Course of Vigorous Secret Practice.

FOOTBALL ELEVEN LINES UP AGAINST HAHNEMANN MEDICAL COLLEGE MEN AND TRIES OUT SOME NEW

TRICKS AND SIGNALS.

Stagg Coaches the Men Chiefly on Defensive Work.

On the eve of the big game, after dinner at the training table, the creative professor (perhaps walking over from his home at 5 704 Maryland) brought in a comic artist from a Loop vaudeville house to relax and entertain his young men after their last supper.

The Michigan team that same evening were staying at the Chicago Beach Hotel, 51st and the lake, and The Journal said they were in the very pink of condition. On the special train with them had come some 350 Ann Arbor fans confident of easy victory, and laying 3 to 1 that Michigan would triple any Chicago score. The Windermere had football people too and so did the Coliseum Hotel down on 63rd Street.

On the Midway, however, there was apprehension. Chicago's fans, said the Inter-Ocean in delicate derision, were "not at all confident, or even to any great extent hoping for a victory, yet they are becoming more strongly convinced that their team will at least die game."

The Maroons had lost their big halfback Kennedy to injuries, and team captain Roby, a lineman, would be playing on a bad leg. Nevertheless, claimed one sports page, in what may have been copy supplied by an undergrad stringer, Stagg's eleven "are in good

cheer and talk hopefully." Captain Roby, in particular, wrote this stylist, who had been reading Victorian boy's novels,

never loses heart, and detects a glimmer of sunshine on the darkest day, speaks bravely of a good battle, and even hints at victory: "The team will play against the odds but they will play for all there is in them, and Michigan may find us a harder nut to crack than she bargained for."

Headlines worried about "many prophecies which have been ventured" about trying to play football in the Coliseum. It was too dark. There were shadows. It was too light. The windows were dazzling. A punt would hit the girders or get lost in the arc electrics. The Inter Ocean's speculation, though wrong, is interesting for its 1890s thinking:

It is held by some that it will be too warm, and players will be enervated and unable to play with snap and vigor. Instances of the special training of bicyclists for indoor runs are cited by those who fear the result of the hothouse game, and they declare that teams coached in the open air cannot last the game out when confined within four walls. The size

of the Coliseum, they contend, will be more than counteracted by the presence of an immense crowd, which will pollute the atmosphere even in a structure of such massive proportions

as the Coliseum.

They were concerned for the fans too:

The objection of the rooter is that it spoils the sport to have it indoors. He prefers to tramp around in the snow or mud and yell himself into a croupy condition, rather than to be confined to a hard-bottomed chair, and breathe a torpid [sic] atmosphere. The indoor feature, however, promises to make the game a greater society event than before, and many box parties will take the place of the old tally-ho [stagecoach] parties. The seventy [Coliseum] boxes originally provided were found to be insufficient, and fourteen more have been constructed.

On game day, 1:30 starting time, the Coliseum was sold out. It could seat 20,000 for a convention when there were acres of chairs on the main floor, such as when William Jennings Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold speech there the previous July. But now the floor had been cleared to make a regulation football gridiron. The fans in the stands and balconies that day numbered some 10,000, which included President Harper and Dean Judson and no doubt many eager Hyde Parkers. Stagg's private papers show that the continued on page 4 ►

w n t e r I 9 9 6

<( conlinued From poge 3 gate was a record $10,812 (in 1896 dollars), the largest in the West up to then. Marshall Field, even when enlarged for the 1895 Michigan game, held only 5000 or 6000.

In his excellent book Staggs University, Robin Lester reminds us that few Chicagoans in the 1890s knew football "either as players or spectators," and indeed the newspapers stressed the collegiate make-up of the crowd this day. Others had come who had never seen football or were curious about the Coliseum. They went as if to the circus or a horse show, and many of them, their curiosity satisfied, left before the game was over.

Chicago fans sat on the west side, Michigan on the east, and their yells collided in the middle:

Go Chi-co, GoChi-ca, GoChico-go!

Whocon? We con! Michi-gon con con!

Beat Chicago!

When the rain started about 2:30 the Coliseum crowd must have felt snug. Up in Evanston that same afternoon, where

Northwestern was holding powerhouse Wisconsin to a 6-6 tie in the mud, the Wisconsin captain would complain later that "the condition of the field materially interfered with our playing. It made fast running impossible." He also said, if we are to believe a newspaper, that "Northwestern has a good team, and they play like sportsmen and gentlemen." Truly a voice from the past.

As for the playing surface in the Coliseum, it was a mixture of loam, sand, and coarse sawdust, packed down by much rolling.

Michigan would object later that "The cleats did not hold." And there were other problems. The barked signals were indistinct, at least to spectators, and

stopped there. "But only at rare intervals," wrote one reporter, "were the Maroons able to make gains by carrying the oval." Hence the value to them of Clarence Herschberger's superb kicking. His booming punts kept getting Chicago out of trouble all afternoon, despite Michigan's best efforts to knock him out of the game by some of that good clean violence.

But the sensation of the afternoon was Herschberger's surprise drop-kick from 45 yards out, a thing of sheer beauty as it flew end-over-end and split the goalposts for 5 points. Thus the Inter-Ocean eye

witness account:

Then come the ploy of the day. Herschberger ran bock five yards. Michigan naturally anticipated a kick, and the bocks went scurrying toward their own goal line. No one outside of that Chicago team, and possibly Stagg, knew what was coming.

Herschberger was forty-five yards from the goal. Clever as he is with his foot, a field goal seemed impossible ....

Cavanaugh [the center] sent him the ball. The knowing ones were surprised to see him let it touch the ground before kicking it.

These set up a yell of amazement. He was

trying to drop kick for a goal. The line held for him. Not a man come through, and before the ends could get around to him the ball was spinning for overhead, like a cannon shot. He was squarely in front of the goalposts, and the boll did not waver an inch. It went through the center of the open space, and Chicago hod scored five points more....

The Chicago team come dancing back down the field, every man of them trying to hug Herschberger. He took his honors with his customary nervous modesty, and never even noticed the crowd which was splitting

its lungs to tell him how they loved him.

during the heaviest of the rainstorm, Besides that 5 points, Chicago

about 3:15, the Coliseum grew too dark defense had blocked a Michigan punt

for play to continue. While waiting for and made 2 points on the resulting

the lights to be turned on, said the :,;;;;..,... safety, scattering the fans who sat in the Tribune, someone struck a match to light :-:-·"'\;:..,. ..;.;.,.-;--;. end zone. For their part, Michigan a cigar. Another, thinking it was done scored a touchdown for 4 points and "as a joke to secure a little illumination," Clarence Herschberger converted for 2 more. Final score: lit another match. "Then others took it up and in a Chicago 7, Michigan 6. It was a tremendous upset. minute hundreds of matches were blazing around the Hyde Park houses must have buzzed with it that entire field." evenmg.

As expected, the Michigan team had much the Back at the Chicago Beach, enemy headquarters, a stronger attack, and "Wolverine interference was one of reporter found that "all was gloom; the yellow and blue the most beautiful things in the game." Three times drooped dejectedly." Interviewed in his room, the they drove to the Chicago 10-yard line and were Michigan captain, Villa, was frustrated: "Herschberger

w n t e r I 9 9 6

did it. We don't wish to rob Chicago of any glory...but it was his punting that did it. Otherwise we outplayed them. That drop-kick of his, I think, has never been equaled." He might well have mentioned the dry footing and still air of the Coliseum. A 45-yard drop kick, even with the fat oval of the 1890s, might never have been attempted with a slippery wet ball in the wind and rain outdoors.

Michigan didn't know it at the time, but Herschberger's kicking was going to beat them again a year later, also in the Coliseum, also on Thanksgiving. By then Michigan was heartily sick of Herschberger and of the Coliseum. But after that no more football games

were ever played in the unlucky, short-lived convention hall. Open for business only two years, and a stimulus to east Woodlawn economy and Hyde Park hotels, the Coliseum burned to the ground on Christmas Eve 1897. Alonzo Stagg must have felt a real pang. His wins against Michigan there had been his greatest triumphs. As for Clarence Bert Herschberger, he played for Chicago until 1898, getting better all the time, and in that year became the first Western player co make

Walter Camp's All-American first team.

The Chicago Eleven, Before and After a Game.

(from Cap and Gown, 1895)

On October 19th, Society members enjoyed visiting some of architect H()ward Van Doren Shaw's W()rk in Hyde Park & Kenwood We are grateful to the Shaw Society for planning a very interesting program and for permission to reprint the article below from the Shaw Society newsletter.

HOWARD VAN DOREN SHAW IN HYDE PARK AND KENWOOD

HOWARD VAN DOREN SHAW SOCIETY NEWS

rnY1 hile the greater Hyde Park and Kenwood LnJ districts of Chicago date back co the mid 1850's, they truly did not become prominent neighborhoods until the late 1880's. The two neighborhoods are noted for their rich tradition of diversity and vitality that is reflected in the architecture of its homes. It was the annexation of the communities

to the City of Chicago along with the World's Columbian Exhibition and the founding of the University of Chicago which most strongly influenced the communities' subsequent development.

While Howard Shaw's career did not begin or end in this community, it is one of the few places where it spanned nearly thirty years, and is an outstanding area in which the greatest collection of his work can be viewed from public streets.

In an article written in 1926 by Howard Shaw's wife, Frances Wells Shaw, she states that "...two Bedford stone Tudor houses, now vine covered, at 4843 and 4845 Lake Avenue...were built with keen anticipation for my sister, Mrs. Charles Atkinson. I think that they are as livable as any he ever built, and you may see chem across from the little Blackstone Library." And so it is true with virtually all of Mr. Shaw's work. Very little if any of his designs are razed due to lack of design and concern on the part of the archi teer. continued on page 6 ►

w n t e r I 9 9 6

< continued from poge 5 What is most amazing about his work in this area is its broad diversity of style. Much of the truly early work of 1894, 1895 and 1896 still stands and serves as examples of his early years when he was still grasping for a truly definitive style of his own. This is especially true of the five Washington Avenue houses of which four are extant. At the same time, we must compare them to the Ina Robertson house and Mr. Shaw's own home in Hyde Park. Beyond this we must also look at such works as the classic Quadrangle Club and the Disciples of Christ Church. Here Mr. Shaw uses his unique adaptations of English Country architecture to blend harmoniously with the nearby University of Chicago buildings. While a great many of the most notable Chicago architects designed and built major residences in the greater Hyde Park and Kenwood districts, it is obvious that Mr. Shaw wru; by far one of the most preferred architects of his time in this area. From the modest homes on Washington Avenue to the massive and most impressive estate built for Mr. Thomas Wilson on Woodlawn Avenue, Mr. Shaw was to be considered a master of design and detail. While there are more than thirty properties still standing, fewer than ten have been razed over the past 100 years. The quality of his work speaks for itself.

Editor's Note: If you want to see for yourself, a map and listing

of Shaw buildings-a walking tour-is available at HPHS headquarters. Bl

HOWARD VAN DOREN SHAW AND f RANK LLOYD WRIGHT

BY DEVEREUX BOWLY, JR.

[Tilyde Park-Kenwood has 4 Frank Lloyd Wright ln.Jhouses (and a notable garage), and more than 30 buildings designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw. Although contemporaries, they designed in very different architectural styles. Wright was the innovative Prairie architect, whereas Shaw designed in European derivative styles, most popular on the East

Coast.

An interesting question involves how did the clients of the two architects differ? As set out in Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients; Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw, by University of Michigan emeritus professor Leonard Eaton (MIT Press, 1969), they were very much different indeed.

Eaton found that the clients of Wright were independent thinkers in their view of architecture, although in other respects were pretty much average middle class people, often constricting Wright by

quite limited budgets. Most were "self-made" businessmen without inherited wealth. They were generally Protestants and Republicans. Although many of the women were suffragettes, the group as a whole was "conventional but not dull." A number, including Frederick Robie who owned a bicycle company, were inventors, and worked for or owned small innovative businesses, not large corporations. An extraordinary number of Wright's clients were musical, which raises interesting questions as to possible connections between the visual and performing arts.

The Clients of Howard Van Doren Shaw included a number of University of Chicago professors and others in Hyde Park and Kenwood, and many wealthy families in Lake Forest, where he built his home Ragdale in 1896, and elsewhere on the North Shore. Shaw graduated from the Harvard School at 47th and Ellis in 1890, and then attended MIT for his architectural training. He participated in a number of civic activities, especially the Art Institute, where he designed the Goodman Theater. Unlike Wright, Shaw's buildings had no particular connection with the prairie or the Midwest, and he had no one overriding style. Shaw's houses are, in the words of Eaton "well proportioned, dignified structures, perfectly suited to the requirements of their exceedingly conservative owners." Their quality compares favorably to the houses of McKim, Mead and White on the East Coast.

Many of Shaw's larger houses were built for second generation wealthy families, such as Gustavus Swift, Jr. Shaw's University of Chicago clients made up a special group. One house was for Mrs. William Rainey Harper, after the death at an early age of her husband. Most were for professors, such as James Breasted. The Kenwood clients were wealthy industrialists. Eaton says "Shaw's clients in the University of Chicago were more conventional people, lacking the streak of individuality which is apparent in the Wright patrons." They, of course, had more education than Wright's clients, a surprising number having gone to Yale. On the average they did not exhibit the intense commitment to music of the Wright clients, and according to Eaton were not strongly marked personalities. None of the wives were active in the suffrage movement. Like Wright's clients they were Republicans, but unlike Wright's clients they were involved in interlocking networks of club memberships, especially the Chicago Club. The overall conclusion that they were more "conventional" than Wright's clients, is consistent with their choice of a conservative architect, rather than the radical architecture of Wright. rl

W i n t e r I 9 9 6

Fire Destroys the Great Sni11l

ing o.nll Imperils the Liyes of Three Hundred.

FOUR PRRSONS MISSING.

BurnR, Geyser, Masoloum, •and

Unfflan, Exhibition Em ployeR, ?thl.y Be Dead..

LOSS PLACED AT $617,000.

ffi he Colisewn on 63rd Street burned and collapsed

W (for the second time) between 6:00 and 6:20

p.m. on Christmas Eve 1897, its hydrants frozen fast, its fireproof paint flaming merrily. Only ten hours later and only a mile away, the new Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago also burned to the ground.

The Club was where the Oriental Institute stands today. It had opened in June 1896 and this was its third fire in six months. It was thirty minutes before the first fire company arrived because most South Side engines were still pouring water on the block-long Colisewn ruins, or else they had been sent to another major fire in the Loop.

Our headlines here are from the Inter-Ocean of December 26, 1897. The picture is from the Times Herald the same day. -J.S.

ESCAPE FROM A FIRE

Six L1ves IInl)erfled ,_

in the Burn-

g Qlladra.ngle Club.

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Built in 1894 and 1895, this duplex townhouse was built in the Tudor style for Howard Shaw and his wife Frances and for Frances's sister and her husband, Mr. & Mrs. Charles Atkinson. The building was razed a number of years ago. See story on page 5.

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Built in 1894 and 1895, this duplex townhouse was built in the Tudor style for Howard Shaw and his wife Frances and for Frances' s sister and her husband, Mr. & Mrs. Charles Atkinson. The building was razed a number of years ago. See story on page 5.

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PUBLISHED BY THE HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY SPRING/SUMMER 1997

Steve Lunch

From the late 1940s to 1965 HPHS headquarters was the Steven's Lunch diner.

As told to Alta Blakely by Steve's grandson, Greg Thorson

n about 1948 or '49 Steve Megales, my grandpa, acquired the business at 5529 South

Lake Park; that is, he owned the furnishings but never the building, which we think remained the property of the Illinois Central Railroad.

Although he was Greek, he served more traditional American bacon and eggs and pancakes for breakfast, franks and hamburgers at lunchtime.

From his third-floor walk-up apartment at 1535 East 55th Street, near Cornell Avenue, under the I.C. tracks and around the corner from the cafe, he and his wife Rose would come to open the restaurant at 4:30 in the morning, serving breakfast, then lunch, and closing at about three in the afternoon. Sometimes he would stay to prepare food for the following day,

especially a beef stew or a pot roast or a ham. Standing all day was hard on his feet.

Tables for customers were small. There were perhaps four, each used for two or three people, to the right of the double doors as they entered, perhaps one or two tables to the left.

The counter was in the middle of the room, running about half or two-thirds the length of the building, starting from the south end. Then, just north of it, was the cash register, where Steve's second wife, Rose, presided. (She also had an interest in fortune-telling.) Steve did the cooking behind the counter, along the east wall, next to the railroad tracks, where there was a stovepipe and a chimney for the oven and grill.

In the small north room Steve kept supplies, money, and perhaps a small bed. A washroom continued on poge 2 ►

< continued from page I was also at that end.

I remember visiting my "Papuli" (as Steve signed his cards to Greg) with my mother when I was about five, watching him in his tall chefs hat, flipping eggs. Breakfast with two eggs was thirty-five cents. I used to sit on the call counter stool, next to the first stool in the row. I liked to play "bus driver" with that first counter stool, turning it this way and rhar--ofren even spinning it nearly off its post!

Steve had a good business. Many University of Chicago students were his customers. If they had almost no money to pay, he would say, "Thar's okay. You just go and be the best doctor or lawyer you can be."

Sergeant Earl Jackson, of the Chicago Police Department, was a customer who also became a good friend. He called Steve "Pops." He

would often stop in his squad car. I remember his telling me that he said to my grandpa, "Hey, you dirty Greek, when are you going to wash that apron?" or "What do you have under that hat, Pops::>" One early morning Sgt. Jackson saw two men preparing to attack Steve. They were in a black car waiting. Sgt.

Jackson and a fellow cop rook them in.

Many trains went by "Steve's Lunch" (officially, Steven's) in those days-the City of New Orleans, the City of Miami, the Seminole, the Carolina Special, the Panama Limited, Michigan Central and the "Big Four" (Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Sr. Louis). All roared by on the embankment overhead, as well as South Shore and South Bend commuter trains and Illinois Central local electric trains.

Toward the end of my grampa's Hyde Park "Steve's Lunch" days, he was diagnosed as a diabetic, and he began to look for a buyer for his business.

By 1963, he had purchased a house in the town of Knox, Indiana, in Stark County, about two hours drive from Chicago. However, he still had the apartment on East 55th Street and was still working in the restaurant while looking for a buyer. By 1963 "Steven's Lunch" was mostly open only on weekdays, and he and Rose went to their Indiana home on weekends. (Wherever they were, I remember they never wanted to miss the Ed Sullivan Show on TV on Sunday evenings.) My grampa had probably sold the business by some time in 1966--perhaps to a Hyde Parker called "Papa Joe" or "Papa John". Bl

Rose, "Papuli" and a young friend

Steve Megales' Pre-HY.de Park D!JYs and His Aic:I to His Family

Steve's daughter, Constance Megales Thorson (Greg's mother}, gives this interesting background of her father:

Efstathios Megales (Steve) had come from Klessura in southwestern Greece in 1915. He stayed in Kansas City for a while, sponsored by a cousin. He was a "gandy dancer" (track worker) on the "Frisco" Railroad. He worked in Warren, Ohio in 1916 and then came to Chicago where he had relatives.

My mother, Olga Lambropoulos, was his first wife, whom he married in 1923. That year he bought a home in the Hegwisch community near 130th Street on the far south side. He worked for Republic Steel, in South Chicago, at the open-hearth.

During all the years, from about 1927 to 1953, he was sending money to family members back in Greece--during the Depression probably $25 a month, later more. Bue the nine-month strike in 1937, with the disagreements between the A.F. of L. and the CIO were very hard on our family.

We had the first telephone in the area (our phone number was South Chicago 9590). We were responsible for twelve families at the steel mill. The phone might ring at midnight, the mill telling us they wanted so-and-so to come in and work. We had

Sprine;/Summer I 9 9 7

to get up and go to tell them.

Our Hegewisch home became like a little Hull House. Relatives kept coming from Greece. As they did, we children would have to give up our beds and sleep on the floor until the relatives were able to find work and move out. From the 1930s there were never fewer than seven people in our home. We had a goat, a cow, lambs and chickens. My mother did lots of cannrng.

In the late 1950s Steve sponsored his brother Harry (Aristedes), who had been a Marine soldier in Greece during World War II, to come to the U.S. In Hyde Park Steve taught him the restaurant business. Harry, in turn, sponsored his eight children and the family of his sister Constantina Apostolou.

Harry's children and Constantina's all worked in Harry's large restaurant in Humbolt Park (The Parkside) that he bought after Steve retired. Harry taught his sons and nephews the restaurant business well. Now they own prosperous restaurants in Chicago, Niles, Burbank, and Lombard. John Apostolou owns or franchises the Giordano's

Restaurants and Pizzerias-in Indiana; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Kissemmee, Florida (near Disney World); and thirty-five in Illinois; he is corporate president of Giordano's. All of these young men have become wealthy.

When Steve Megales retired to Knox, Indiana, he had little money. But he was happy; he had helped his family to a fine legacy. He died January 30, 1969.

Editor's note:

Mrs. Donald Robert Erickson (Cathy) was liaison for these interviews, thus making this story possible.

We welcome our readers' additions to the history of 5529. For example, was there a restaurant on the premises before 1948 or '49? Dev Bowly remembers a rather widely held story that Steve was given the business by a railroad as compensation for a railroad-related injury, but Greg Thorson and his mother say this is not so. Who remembers the history of the property after 1966? Please address replies to Alta Blakely or Theresa McDermott, Hyde Park Historical Society, 5529 S. Lake Park Ave., Chicago 60637.

Steve, Rose and a helper in their diner

Sprin /Sumrner I 9 9 7

Robie House Becomes Historic House Museum

1111 s you know, the Frederick C. Robie

Iii House-Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie

masterpiece has been leased to the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation by the University of Chicago so that it can be restored and operated as a historic house museum.

Considered an architectural masterpiece, this quintessential Prairie house features sweeping horizontal planes, dramatic cantilevers and long ribbons of art glass windows. Neighbors were shocked by its revolutionary design in 1910, but more than 80 years later the building remains a cornerstone of modern functional form.

Robie House was commissioned by Frederick Carleton Robie, a young bicycle manufacturer, whose interest in cars led Wright to build him one of the first three-car attached garages in the world. The house remained a private residence until 1962 when it was acquired by the Chicago Theological

Seminary, which used the building as a dormitory and dining hall for students, but was mainly interested in re-developing the site.

In 1941, learning that the house was to be demolished, Wright led a campaign to save the building. In 1957, the 90-year-old Wright led another successful battle for its preservation. In 1963, Robie House was donated to the University of Chicago and designated a National Historic Landmark; it was subsequently used to house the University's Office of Alumnae Relations.

The Foundation will undertake a comprehensive restoration of the Robie House, provide regular tours of the building, and offer a number of educational programs related to Wright and the Robie House. Presently tours are offered daily at noon; visitors can purchase tickets at the main entrance on Woodlawn. Adults $8. Seniors (65 +) and Youth (7-14) $6. For tour information, call 708-848-1978.

S p r ni;/Summe I 9 9 7

MEMBER s please note ,

The Frank Uoyd Home and Studio

Announces Volunteer Training for Robie House

Applicants are being accepted for the third Robie House interpreter training program which begins on

May 31. This intensive course will meet for three consecutive Sarurdays-May 31,June 7, and June 14-from 9am until 12 noon, and on Thursday,June 5, from 7 to 9pm.

If you are interested in sharing with visitors from around the world one of the country's most historic structures-Wright himself called it" the cornerstone of modern architecture"-you are encouraged to register.

You will learn about Wright's life and work through slide presentations, in-depth tours of the home and outside reading, while examining the principals of successful architectural interpretation. For more information or to register, call Robie House Operations Manager Janet Van Delft, at 773-834-1362.

S p r n g u m m e r I 9 9 7

Notes from the Archives

by Stephen A. Treffman, HPHS Archivist

IQ KY EYES: A promotional flyer

121 featuring "Sky Eyes" that

probably dates from the 1940s or early 50s has recently been donated to our archives by Helene E. Brewer, a long time Hyde Park resident now living in Connecticut. Sky Eyes, pictured here, is described as an accomplished singer and lecturer on Native American spirituality with references from such diverse groups as the Executives Club of Chicago, the Ottawa Illinois Home bureau, the Pure Milk Association, and the Commonwealth Club of Greenwood, Mississippi!! The brochure lists an address at 5321 South Cornell. If any of our readers has more information about Sky Eyes, we would be delighted to include it in a future newsletter.

Mrs. Brewer, once owner of the Hyde Park florist in the Del Prado Hotel, was active in the south side Zonta organization and in the Hyde Park Business and Professional Association. Among her other gifts to us are a Zonta membership list from the early 1950s, a copy of the 1962 HPBPA annual program and director's list, and several items related to the Chicago Osteopathic Hospital, where her late husband, Dr.

Darl Brewer, D.O., was affiliated and where Mrs. Brewer also served a term as director of volunteers.

These materials have considerable potential for researchers into our community's history. We are very grateful for Mr. Brewer's gifts as well as for similar donations: from Alta Blakely-the 1959 annual report of the Hyde Park YMCA; from Roberta Siegel and Joan Dix various editions of the Hyde Park High School's "Aichpes" dating from the 30s and early 40s; and from Frances Guterbock-decades of programs and membership records from the Hyde Park Music Club.

When you come upon similar bits of Hyde Park History, please consider giving them to the Society.

Sprine;/Summer I 9 9 7

Historical Happenings...

Did you get to our Annual Meeting?

We were royally entertained at our annual meeting on February 22nd when members of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, led by those inimitable G & S practitioners, Bob Ashenhurst and Roland Bailey, presented selections from The Sorcerer.

It was a delightful performance and the Society is very grateful to all members of the cast: Roland and Helen Bailey, David Currie,...

This year's meeting was dedicated to the memory of John McDermott who had passed away during the summer. John was a long-time friend of the Society having served on the Board of Directors for several years and as MC at our annual meetings since their inception.

Our Paul Cornell Awards this year went to:

Andre W. Carus, Owner, and John Thorpe, Architect, for the renovation of the Cams house at 5537 S. University.

Wilbert Hasbrouck, Architect, for the renovation of the bridge at 59th and South Shore Drive.

The University of Chicago, Owner, for the exterior renovation of the commercial building at 57th and Kenwood.

Congratulations Awardees!

On-going exhibit at HPHS Headquarters:

The 57th Street Art Fair: Fifty Years

Be sure to stop at HPHS Headquarters co see the wonderful display of 50 years of our Hyde Park Art Fair. At a special presentation on May 4th, John Parker helped us remember some of those early days. In a video interview we heard of the very beginnings from Mary Louise Womer, founder of the Art Fair. The 1997 Fair is coming up on the weekend of June 7-8; it might be even more interesting to you if you have delved a little into the history of this very special Hyde Park

■ T ■

From the

Hyde Park Herald

of Yesteryear:

WANTED: A good boy to learn the printer's trade. He must have a fair English edu-cation, must live at home, with his parents, relatives or guardian. He must leave smoking, chewing, drinking liquor and beer, as well as swearing, entirely with the editor. Such a boy will find a situation at the office of the HYDE PARK HERALD, where he will be taught the entire business so that he may be able to do any and every part of the work, on a newspa-per or in a job office.

All debts due to the Hyde Park Publishing Company must be paid at once. We pay as we go; now come and settle up every mother's son of you.

Friday, November 25, 1887

An explosion which gutted the house and upset the neighborhood

► occurred on West 55th St. last night. The affair brought to light a custard pie factory which had evidently been

► operating for some time under the innocent guise of a gambling house, its true purpose unsuspected by the authorities. Federal agents who were quickly on the scene in search of evidence confiscated four rolling pins and a pie-board.

October 13, 1922

event.

■ ■

S p r i n e; Summer I 9 9 7

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PUBLISHED BY THE HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY SUMMER/FALL 1997

Steve Lunch: Part II

By Alta Blakely

1111 t the end of our story "Steve's Lunch" in the

liJ Spring/Summer issue of Hyde Park History,

we asked our readers, if they could, to expand on the history of our HPHS headquarters building at 5529 Lake Park. We have had some gratifying responses. The first came from Richard Kadlec of Kokomo, Indiana, who told us about the restaurant that was here before Steve Margalis's "Lunch." (See his letter on page 3.) This clears up the long standing mystery about what restauranteur was given the concession because of physical injuries sustained while working on the Illinois Central Railroad. Three others provided us with more details on Steve's Lunch.

Sidney Ervin Williams, former HPHS Board member (who in 1974 ran for alderman of the Fifth Ward) was the first to respond:

In the early 1960s I was a student at Brete Harte Elementary School at 56th and Stony Island. A lot of tmcks stopped at Steve's. There were trucks with Michigan and Indiana license plates-steel trucks, coal trucks, lumber trucks. Early in the morning they'd even be double-parked in front of Steve's. (Those were the days before power steering. so you'd see these truck drivers with their enonnous arrm.)

There was more than one phone at Steve's at that time,

so these men would stop in-perhaps headed to 39th Street the other side of the Dan Ryan-to phone their final destinations. They would call, "I'm at Steve's Lunch. I'm coming on in."

The cops from the police station at 53rd and Lake Park were also regular mstorners. They would get right out of their police cars and go in for morning coffee.

I seem to remember that there were three or four small sheds outside, south of the building, continued on poge 2 ►

cont;nued from poge l maybe for keeping coal or refrigerating milk; there wasn't much room inside. Actually, I have two or three pieces of the original benches from the building, from the time it was the cable car station. I got them from Betty Meyer, a neighbor of ours who lived at 5325 South Dorchester. They are of oak, rounded on one edge, almost two inches thick. There's a total of maybe nine feet.

You should go down to 57th Street and talk to the man at the barber shop. His name might be Pete. Or to the man at the shoe repair shop. His name might be Nick. They'd remember Steve and Rosie.

In the cool of the morning on July 24th, I trekked down to 57th street, first to the University Barber Shop at 5700 South Harper. It turned out that Pete Macknicki, the Polish one-time owner, had died many years ago, but Frank Parisi had lots of memories:

Yes, Pete sold the shop to Floyd Arnold in 1952. It used to be at 1453 East 57th. I came to work for Floyd in 1955, then bought the shop in '67. I sold it to that man at the first chair, but I continue to work here.

Sure I remember Steve and Rosie. Everybody ate there.

For lunch there would be corned beef and cabbage, pot roast, stews. The portions were so big, I got up to 150 pounds. One of the customers would say, "Rosie, take it easy on the potatoes." She'd say, "If we give you too much, go eat somewhere else." Or a man would say, "Please Rosie, not such a big piece of pie." Rosie would answer, "If you don't want such a big piece, go to Walgreens.'"

Rosie had trouble with her legs. They were almost always wrapped One time an ambulance had to come to get her. Maybe a burst vein or something.

Our next stop was at the Hyde Park Shoe Rebuilder, at 1451 E. 57th. Outside we found "Gus" (Constantinos) Lukis sitting on a stool. We went into the shop:

Sure, I remember Steve's Lunch. My uncle and I would buy breakfast there almost every morning when we came to work. My uncle, John Richards, used to have the shoe repair shop on the north side of 55th near Blackstone.

Hanlin's Drug Store was on the corner, then the shoe shop, then Jewell Foods. Well, yes, I know that John Richards doesn't sound like a Greek name. He was John Psihitsas until he fought in France in World War I.

But he opened the shoe repair shop in 1914. When the buildings along 55th were all torn down during Urban Renewal, he moved the business down here to 57th Street. The family was living at 5440 Dorchester. My uncle and

I would go by Steve's and pick up breakfast and bring it on down to the shop. There wasn't very much room at Steve's.

Rosie was a character. She'd tell you right out what she thought. She was the talker. Steve didn't say too much.

When my two boys were taking accordion lessons, Rosie was taking lessons too, from the same Italian teacher. (The man in that picture that you called a worker in the

restaurant - I don't think he was a worker. It was always just Steve and Rosie.)

The food at Steve's was delicious. For breakfast there'd be bacon and eggs, potatoes, fried onions, toast, tomatoes, omelet. There was beef stew or liver and onions for lunch.

When Steve wanted to retire, he sold the business and moved to Indiana. One of the policemen who'd been a mstomer and friend-named Johnny - used to go out to Indiana sometimes to visit with Steve and Rosie.

I don't remember the name of the new owner. No, "Papa Joe" or "Papa John" doesn't ring a bell. But he only lasted about two months. The food wasn't the same. And you've got to joke with the customers. He just didn't have the personality that Steve and Rosie had. Ii

Summer/Fall I 9 9 7

Looking Back

In response to Alta's request for more information on the history of HPHS headquarters...

By Sidney E. Williams

Many people have long forgotten how raucously bustling the pre-Urban Renewal thoroughfares of Hyde Park were. Both Lake Park Avenue and 55th Street were lively major commercial strips, teeming with loud pedestrian, trolley and vehicular traffic until late into the night. Street life was quite intense. Commercial and residential population density on the business strips was high even by today's standards.

At that time Hyde Park was still largely a blue collar, working-class community. Lake Park Avenue and 55th Street were mostly the domain of workingmen. You may remember that one of the continual arguments that Julian Levi made to advance Urban Renewal was the fact that there were over fifty (50) bars on 55th Street and Lake Park Avenue. Those bars served mainly the working-class elements.

Not only were there many bars meeting the drinking needs of workingmen, but there were a host of eateries catering to their food needs. Steve's Lunch was the one that mostly served the early-morning trucker/ livery crowd I also remember newspaper, milk and laundry delivery men along with assorted other professional drivers stopping there.

You may remember that south of the cab stand at 56th and Stony was a hot dog shack called Ed's Lunch. Next to Ed's was the Gateway Garage which also had within it a Sinclair gas station. (That building still stands.) Gateway, along with abo11t three other large garages on Lake Park, housed the many limousines and private cars that serviced Hyde Park's lakefront "Gold Coast." Chauffeurs, car jockeys and mechanics from Gateway, Hyde Park Chevrolet, and neighboring garages all used to frequent Steve's Lunch.

And a letter from Richard Kadlec

of Kokomo Indiana:

Dear Ms. Blakely:

I enjoyed reading about Steve's Lunch in Hyde Park History. Here is some additional information. Prior to Steve's, another restaurant was in the same location. It was run by two brothers and one of their wives. One brother was named Harv. Their father was an IC employee who lost both of his legs in an accident. For this reason, from the end of the thirties, the IC let them use the building rent-free.

This information is all hearsay. It is mostly based on the recollections of my cousin, Earl Koukol. My father and Earl had garages (Kadlec's Auto Service) at 5422 Lake Park from 1936 until they moved in1943. Their new location was on Harper, 2 doors north of Cable court. The business remained there until Urban Renewal. They often ate breakfast at the "Hole in the Wall" restaurant: thirty-five cents for large servings of hash browned potatoes, bacon, eggs, and oatmeal.

I lived at 5436 Dorchester from 1936 to 1951 and look forward to receiving each new edition of Hyde Park History. Keep up the good work.

Sincerely, Richard Kadlec

Summer/Fall r g g 7

National Landmark Skeet Shooters Clubhouse Comes Dov,n

Devereux Bowly's Letter to the Hyde Park Herald, March 5, 1997, explains how it happened.

To the editor:

On February 18 the Chicago Park District demolished the Skeet Shooters Clubhouse at 68th Street and the lake, in South Shore Cultural Center Park (formerly South Shore Country Club). The building was on the National Register of Historic Places, and was demolished without a permit, without regard to the city's Lakefront Protection Ordinance, and without a public hearing. I and others spent years trying to convince the Park

District to preserve the building, which was the little gem of the South side lake front. The second evening after the demolition I went to take a last look at the pile of rubble which had been the building, but was turned away by a security guard. It is ironic that for a decade the Park District declined to protect the building from vandals but posted a guard there after its demolition.

Signed: Devereux Bowly

Summer/Fall I 9 9 7

Rose Garden on Wooded Island...

11the garden Chicago inherited from the World's Fair''

from The Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1901

With a wealth of roses which has made it famous in late years, Wooded Island in Jackson Park now offers its annual display for the inspection of the public. Thousands of roses of many hues and filling the air with their fragrance, have opened their petals at this popular flower garden, presenting a picture excelling those of previous years. But they are not the only flowers. Great bunches of many colored iris-purple, yellow, and blue in combinations, yellow poppies and lemon lilles combine to produce many fine effects in the hedged inclosure that is the especial pride of Head Gardner Fred Kanst.

This postcard, from the collection of Steve Treffman, shows the Rose Garden in 1906. The message on the reverse reads: "I have not been to this park yet. We got home last night at 10pm. Did not feel very good. I think I will go back on the train. I can't stand the lake." It was sent to Sodus, Michigan.

Washington Park

as described by Charles Dudley Warner in his article "Studies of the Great West-Chicago" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1888

Washington Park, with a slightly rolling surface and beautiful landscape gardening, has not only fine driveways, but a splendid road set apart for horsemen. This is a dirt road, always well sprinkled, and the equestrian has a chance besides of a gallop over springy turf. Water is now so abundantly provided that this park is kept green in the driest season. From anywhere in the south side one may mount his horse or enter his carriage for a turn of fifteen or twenty miles on what is equivalent to a country road, that is to say, an English country road. Of the effect of this facility on social life I shall have occasion to speak. On the lake side of Washingotn Park are the grounds of the Washington Park Racing Club, with a splendid track, and stables and other facilities which, I am told, exceed anything in the country of the kind. The dub-house itself is very handsome and commodious, is open to the members and their families summer and winter, and makes a favorite rendezvous for that part of society which shares its privileges. Besides its large dining and dancing halls, it has elegant apartments set apart for ladies. In winter its hospitable rooms and big wood fires are very attractive after a zero drive.

Summer F a I I I 9 9 7

Dear Hyde Park Historical Society Members and Friends:

The fourth quarter of 1997 is almost here and your Historical Society, like most other organizations, will be closing its books for 1997. We want to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest, attendance at our events and for your financial support. Our members are both loyal and generous.

As you are aware, our Historical Society pays all operating expenses from membership dues. We have an annual budget of just over $5000 and currently our dues meet these expenses. I am happy to advise that we do have a balanced budget and no debt. On the other hand, we have very little excess cash for ernergencies, planned maintenance or restoration. At the present time we are looking forward to replacing our roof, tuckpointing and limestone restoration on the front facade. We expect approximately $20,000 in expenses over the next 3 years.

May I ask for some special favors from you?

• Encourage friends and relatives to become members ( or give them a holiday gift membership).

•Bea Contributor, Sponsor or Benefactor at renewal time.

• If your employer has a matching gift program, please submit our name.

• Remember us in your will.

We wish to thank everyone for such genero11,s contributions during 1997. We have listed them so that you too can thank them.

Just a reminder that renewal time is drawing near for 1998 membership. Please help 11,s to keep Hyde Park History alive.

Sincerely,

Tom Pavelec, President

General Patricia Collette Gayle Janowitz Nancy Rosenbacher

Membership Alex Coutts Sheridan A Jansen Mr. & Mrs. Edward Rosenheim

Khazan & Joan Agrawal Thelma Dahlberg Elsa L. Johnson Dr. Wallace Rusterholtz

Estrella Alamar Ida B. DePencier Richard Kadlec Riyo Sato

Jane Teresa Alayu Bernard J. DelGiorno Margaret & Winston Kennedy Daniel & Mary Schlessinger

Robert & Deborah Aliber Erl & Milly Dordal Fred & Mary Beth Kopko Mr. & Mrs. Robert Schloerb

Rita & Dick Allen Yaffa Claire Draznin Mr. & Mrs. Eugene Krell Arthur & Carol Schneider

Anita Anderson Jori & Rose Dyrud William Kruskal Lillian H. Schwartz

Douglas Anderson Peter & Janice Elliot Sue B. Latham Kevin Shalla & Victoria Ferrera

Linnea 0. Anderson Terry P. Ellis Carol Lefevre Soubretta Skyles

Mark Ashin Mrs. Morton B. Epstein Howard F. Lewis Mrs. Richard L. Stevens

Roland & Helen Bailey Bill & Nora Erikson Eileen Libby William B. Stone

Lawrence W. Bay David & Joyce Feuer Allen County Public Library Mr. & Mrs. Edward G. Stroble

Bert Benade John & Sally Fish Delphine Lutes Mrs. King C. Stutzman

Carol Benade Sue & Paul Freehling Inge Maser David & Linda Tartof

Marjorie Benson Edlyn Freerks Jane & George Mather Florence Teegarden

Mrs Edwin A Bergman Roger & Madelon Fross Georgie Maynard Jane Noyes Thain

Beatrice Blackiston Judith Getzels Janet & David Midgely Antoinette Tyskling

Alta M. Blakely Ethel & Julian Goldsmith Aurelia Moody Vi Fogle Uretz

Sophie Bloom Margaret H. Grant & Family Bob & Shabron Newton Frank & Betty Wagner

Berence A. Boehm Audrey & Ronald Grzywinski Ward & Dorothy Perrin Martin Wallace

Patrick Bova Nancy Harlan George W. Platzman Margaret Walters

Devereux Bowly Chaucy & Edith Harris Elizabeth Postell Mr. & Mrs. Clyde Watkins

Carol & Jesse Bradford Kiyo Hashimoto Mr. & Mrs. James Ratcliffe Conrad Wennerberg

Edward A Campbell Sr. Rosemary Hollerich, OP Miriam Reitz Mrs. Warner Wick

Judy & Cedric Chernik Eugene & Imogene Huffine Robert J. Rigacci Kale & Helen Williams

Eva Cohen Mr. & Mrs. Richard Jaffe Dolores M. Rix Mildred J. Williams

Summer/Fall I Q Q 7

Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation

Contributors

Mary S. Allen Robert Ashenhurst Oswelda Badal

Jim & Jane Comisky

Irene & .Charles Custer Leon & Marion Despres Margaret C. Fallers Frances & James Flood Jane & Roger Hildebrand Knox C. Hill

Dorothy & Emile Karafiol Stella & Margaret Keck Margaret S. Matchett Margaret S. Meyer

Hans & Katherine Morsbach Mr. & Mrs. Jay Mulberry Marion Pendelton Obenhaus Robert, Rita & Kitty Picken Clemens & Judith Roothaan Alice Rubovits

Margaret R. Sagers

Alice & Nathan Schlessinger Frank & Karen Schneider Fred & Nikki Stein

Mrs. Gustavus F. Swift Harold Weinstein

Ruth & Quentin Young

Sponsors Spenser & Lesley Bloch Dorothy & David Crabb Mr. & Mrs. Edward Levi

Mrs. John A. McDermott Tom & Georgene Pavelec Harriet Rylaarsdam Diane & Louis Silverman Constance M. Thorson

Benefactor

James B. Stronks

Special Bequests

Jean Block Foundation

Summer/Fall I 9 9 7

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HPHS Headquarters Building

Becomes Less Endangered

by Alta Blakely

fiillociety Board members are breathing sighs of relief l!P.I now that the shoring up of the Metra embankment behind our building has been completed.

Bert Benade, Board member in charge of the physical plant, had been particularly concerned that the embankment had been pushing on our roof and gutter on the east side. About sixteen years ago the Illinois Central Railroad had shored up the embankment, but the job had been done with only wood pilings-and those not driven deeply enough into the ground. They have continued to rot away. Devereaux Bowly, co-chair with Bert on the physical plant, had been after the railroad, now Metra, for about four years to replace the rotting pilings.

Work was begun last October. For many weeks a large truck crane (and a Port-o-Let) stood on the street in front of headquarters, dwarfing it in size. (The construction work meant that the October 19th program on Robie House had to be postponed.)

The large sign south of Headquarters proclaims that this

"Hyde Park Retaining Wall Rehabilitation" is a "Federal Transit Administration Project... sponsored by the Northeastern Illinois Regional Commuter R.A. Corporation D/BIA Metra the U.S. Department of Transport; and the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA)." It is "Federal Project No. IL-03-0194, RTA Program No. CRD-034. }J continued on page 2 ►

<( continued from page I On one mid-week day in October, when a Board member was entering headquarters, two of the construction crew members asked if they could look around inside. Bob Pritchard, of Hickory Hills, whose job it was to run the air compressor was excited by what he saw. Later, when Bea Blackiston was on duty on Sunday, November 2nd, Mr. Pritchard came in and carefully removed all our pictures off the walls and gently and neatly laid them on a table. He was afraid that the vibrations from his air compressor would shake the pictures off the walls and shatter the glass. "I like things old to be preserved," he said. (The Board, at its November meeting, asked Secretary Margaret Matchett to send him a letter of thanks, which she has subsequently done.)

Thanks to Mr. Pritchard, we were able to contact Harenfra Namgrola of the Sumit Construction Company of Skokie, in charge of the project. He told us that the work on the embankment behind our building amounted to the sum of $150,000. They had been allowed sixty-five working days for the job; however, he said, they finished in far less time. The final phase, the cement work, was laid during Thanksgiving week. The question in our minds has been whether or not this job was part of the larger Hyde Park Retaining-Wall Rehabilitation, --including the Metra embankment from 47th to 57th Street. Mr. Margrola seemed to think not.

Looking our from the windows on the east side of headquarters one dark evening, Dev. Bowly was delighted: "There's a foot of space between the embankment and our roof! I can see the stars!" !I

From Jim Stronlcs...

In the "Chicago Day" piece (October, 1994) I showed that the crowd (attending the Columbian Exposition on Chicago Day) standing single file, shoul er to shoulder'. would stretch 216 miles. I wish I had pointed out that 1t would

readers:

Can any of our readers provide us with any information about the following persons from the 1930s, all friends of Clarence Darrow?

take 3 and 1 /2 hours to drive by them at 60 miles per hour. Simply astounding.'

William L. Carlin William L. Maclaskey Angus Roy Shannon

Joseph R. Hamilton Dwight McKay George G. Whitehead

Also, information is sought regarding the Kenwood Institute, a turn-of-the-century school located at 46th and Ellis.

Winter 1997-98

Notes from the Archives

Mayor Harold Washington, 1922-1987 On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death

by Stephen Treffman

These political pins from our archival collection date from the triumphant 1983

and 1987 mayoral campaigns of the late Mayor Harold Washington. Mayor

Washington, the only sitting mayor of Chicago ever

resident in the community of Hyde Park, made his home in Apartment 66 of the Hampton House Condominium, 5300 South Shore Drive. Across from that building is Hyde Park's oldest park, established by Paul Cornell, Hyde Park's founder. Originally called East End Park, it was renamed in memory of the late Mayor after his death. Washington had a very substantial and enthusiastic base of supporters from our community's diverse racial, social and economic groups. A number of persons from Hyde Park-Kenwood were recruited into high level administrative, advisory and policy-making roles in city government during his administration.

One of Harold Washington's essential characteristics was his capacity to reach out and engage persons and groups not necessarily considered part of the historic political mainstream but whose goals and principles intersected at some point practically or symbolically with his. It

should not be surprising, then, that among his last official acts before his sudden death on November 25, 1987, was a proclamation issued on November 18 declaring November 21 "Oliver Law

and Abraham Lincoln Brigade Day in Chicago." The letter, reproduced on the next page, was published in the

program for a 50th Anniversary memorial

celebration of the Brigade held that day in Chicago.

In 193 7, three thousand Americans calling themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALB) volunteered to join an international force in defense of Spain's elected government against insurgent Fascist forces militarily supported by Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. Two hundred of the volunteers came from Chicago, including at least one long-time Hyde Park resident, the late Milton Cohen (1915-1996?), and an African-American by the name of Oliver Law (born c.1900).

Law was one of some one hundred black Americans to join the ABL. He had served six years as a private in the segregated U.S. Army during and after World War I. He then moved to Chicago where he worked as a stevedore, cab driver and small restaurant manager. With the onset of the Depression he was attracted to various organizing efforts among the unemployed in Chicago, ultimately joining the

Communist Party and leading continued on poge 5 ►

w n t e r 1997-98

OFFICE OF THE MAYOR

CITY OF CHICAGO

HAROLD WASHINGTON

MAYOR

P R O C L A M A T I O N

WHEREAS, this year marks the 50th Anniversary of the entrance of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as volunteers in defense of democracy in the Spanish Civil War; and

WHEREAS, over 200 Chicagoans joined this international movement to stop the spread of fascism; and

WHEREAS, Oliver Law, a leader of movements for relief of t-h---ec---p"'o=or crm:t eor pu-litical rights for Bracks and working people in Chicago in the early 1930's, was a commander in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, thus becoming the first Black American to lead an integrated military force in the history of the United States; and

WHEREAS, the long-neglected historical significance of Oliver Law is being recognized in a program on November 21, 1987, sponsored by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the 50th Anniversary Committee, which will honor the continuing legacy of international solidarity represented by Oliver Law and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Harold Washington, Mayor of the City of Chicago, do hereby proclaim November 21, 1987, to be OLIVER LAW AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE DAY IN CHICAGO and urge

all citizens to be cognizant of the special events arranged for this time and the importance of thi history.

Dated this day of November, 1987.

W i n t e r ,997-98

-< continued From page 3 public protests of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. He left with the Brigade for Spain in January, 1937. His previous military experience and demonstrated valor in battle led to his appointment as commander of an ALB battalion made up mostly of white Americans, the historic symbolism of which he was fully aware and to which Washington alludes in his proclamation. On July 9, nearly six months after his arrival in Spain, Law was mortally wounded while leading his forces in a battle near the town of Brunete.

Eight hundred ALB volunteers died in the Spanish conflict. Although many surviving ALB volunteers went on to serve with the American armed forces in World War II, they were deemed suspect by the U. S. government duri,ng and after the war for having been "premature" in their enthusiastic antifascism and, in some cases, their real or supposed radical ideological and political commitments.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine any post-war Chicago mayor before Washington, himself a World War II veteran, issuing such a letter. The proclamation reflects some of the profound values and aspirations that characterized Harold

Washington and made his administration so unusual in Chicago history. m

Do you remember the Metropole Laundry on the south side of 55th Street between Woodlawn and Kimbark, where senior citizen housing now stands?

How do you like the prices?

Sources: Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, Stanford, 1994; John Gerassi, The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39, An Oral History, New York, 1986; Arthur H. Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York, 1967. Thanks also to

Alderman Toni Preckwinkle for her assistance in providing information about Mayor Washington's residence.

Winter 1997-98

Letter to the Editor...

We are very grateful to Jim Stronks, author of many outstanding articles which have appeared in this publication, for the delightful and touching letter below:

Dear Edi tor:

I don't know if it is Hyde Park History, exactly, but then isn't almost everything history in some sense? I hope so, because I have read something that I think your readers would find interesting.

In 1895 William Rainey Harper hired a young professor-poet named William Vaughan Moody for the new university on the Midway. And that is where Moody, a bachelor of twenty-seven, lived at first-on the Midway, in the old Del Prado Hotel on 59th Street, where International House stands today.

Late in the afternoon of February 15, 1896, Moody escaped his office for an hour of ice-skating. Later he wrote about it to a friend in a paragraph that reaches across one hundred years to touch us with its humanity.

"Dear Dan," Moody began. "Yesterday I was skating on a patch of ice in the park, under a poverty-stricken sky flying a rag of sunset. Some little muckers were guying a slim raw-boned Irish girl of fifteen, who circled and darted under

their banter with complete unconcern. She was in the fledgling stage, all legs and arms, tall and adorably awkward, with a huge hat full of rusty feathers, thin skirts tucked up above spindling ankles, and a gay aplomb and swing in the body that was ravishing. We caught hands in mid

/light, and skated for an hour, almost alone and quite silent, while the rag of a sunset rotted to pieces. I have had few sensations in life that I would exchange for the warmth of her hand through the ragged glove, and the pathetic curve of the half-formed breast where the back of my wrist touched her body. I came away mystically shaken and elate. It is thus the angels converse. She was something absolutely authentic, new, and inexpressible, something which only nature could mix for the heart's intoxication, a compound of ragamuffin, pal, mistress, nun, sister, harlequin, outcast, and bird of God, - with something else bafflingly suffused, something ridiculous and frail and tender."

Fortunately Dan did not throw away the letter, and that young girl is as alive today as she was that afternoon in 1896-because a poet captured her on the head of a pin.

Moody died in 19101 aged 41.

Yours truly, Jim Stronks Iowa City, Iowa

SPECIAL EVEN IS caming ub...

Robie House: Its History and Its Future

Sunday, March 1st, at 2pm HPHS Headquarters

A slide presentation by Jay Champelli, long-time member of the Speakers' Bureau of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation.

Join us to learn more about this historical and architectural treasure presently being restored to its former glory here in Hyde Park.

Free Tours of Robie House for Hyde Park Residents

Saturday & Sunday, February 14 & 15

A Valentine event to convey "Heartfelt Thanks to the Community," tours will be offered continuously from 11am to 3:30pm on each day.

Exhibits in the Months Ahead

An exhibit entitled Hyde Park's Hotels: The Golden Age, 1888-1940 will be opening soon at our headquarters. An exhibit on the White City Amusement Park is also planned for later in 1998. Curated by our archivist Stephen Treffman, both exhibits will be accompanied by programs presented by various members of our board. Further information on these and other events will be forthcoming in Hyde Park History and in other commumty sources.

Readers who have photographs, printed materials or other memorabilia related to any of Hyde Park's hotels or to the White City Amusement park are encouraged to write or to leave a message at our headquarters. Our phone number is 773-493-1893.

Wi nter 1997-98

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HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ttlt®IT

Volume 2, Number 1 February, 1980

POWHATAN, RANNEY, GERICK GET CORNELL AWARDS

For the Society's annual meeting and dinner on January 19, Thelma Dahlberg and Betty Davey created some entertaining, amusing (and humbling) historical quizzes, members were brought up to date on the status of the headquarters building renovation project, the new officers and committee chairmen were introduced,'and--highlight of the evening!--this year's Paul Cornell Awards were announced. Here they are:

e TO THE POWHATAN COOPERATIVE ASSOCIATION, "for the sensitive return to the spirit of Art Deco in the renovation of this classic apartment build ing [4950 Chicago Beach Drive], re-using old fixtures and restoring old features wherever possible."

Meet our new officers: President--Clyde Watkins. Ana

tive Hyde Parker, he was one of the founders of the Hyde Park Historical Society. Until recently director of development for the University, he is now with the public relations firm of Charles Feldstein and Co.

Vice-President--John McDermott. He has lived here for 20 years, is editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter, heads the National Cath olic Council for Interracial Justic

Secretary--Margaret (Mrs. Lloyd) Fallers. A faculty child, she grew up in Hyde Park, later became a fac ulty wife, Lab School teacher, U High Principal. She now heads the University's affirmative action program.

Treasurer--Gary Husted. A com munity resident for 3 1/2 yrs., he owns the elegant old Roberts house in Kenwood. He is an accountant

e TO VICTORIA POST RANNEY, "for

organizing and directing the Com mittee to Save the Rosenwald House, thereby contributing significantly to community awareness of the con tinuing importance of the historic preservation effort."

e TO JOSHUA GERICK, "for construc ting a scale model of the Rosenwald House which received commendation in a city-wide competition of high

school history projects and was dis played at the Ancona School Kenwood House Tour and the 57th St. Art Fair." Joshua has just left Kenwood Academy for the Parsons School of Design in New York.

(Categories and rules for the Paul Cornell Awards were printed in our last Newsletter.)□

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL WINNERS!

IT'S TIME TO RENEW YOUR MEMBER

SHIP in the HPHS--still only $5.00 per family per year. Send your check, drawn to the Hyde Park Historical Society, to Gerhardt Laves 5553

Kenwood Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

... to page 5

Early Days at the Lab School and U High

"W.e

She sits relaxed in a living room chair--relaxed Carroll Russell style, that is, which means that her back is straight and her feet are on the floor; dancers don't slump. A trim, small woman with fluffy short hair that is still more blonde than gray, her eyes sparkle as we talk about the Hyde Park she knew as a child.

Born Carroll Adelaide Mason, she lived in the house at 5715 Woodlawn

(now Hillel House) which Howard Van Doren Shaw built for her tamily, and kept her pony in a barn at the south east corner of 57th and Woodlawn, (now the site of Meadville-Lombard Theological Seminary).

She had entered kindergarten at the University of Chicago Elemen tary School in 1904, the year that pioneer of progressive education opened. "I get very excited when I remember it," she says. "We had no strict rules and were as free as birds, yet we were self-disciplined and orderly... We didn't study much spelling or much history but we studied electricity and made a dy namo... There were always chairs in the back of the room for parents

or visiting pedagogues."

In attendance at U High after its merger with the Chicago Manual Training School, she remembers how "we sewed and we cooked--boys and girls both--and hammered and sawed things to give to our mamas for Christmas. I still have some of them."

Next: enrollment in the Univer sity of Chicago College and in due course a love affair. Paul (Pete) Russell was a Big Man on Campus--

a star athlete (captain of the foot ball team in 1916), and a Deke. Af ter graduation, he went to work for the Harris Bank and Carroll got a clerical job until "my Peter" saved enough for them to marry.

Harold Swift [see item on p. 7], a fellow Deke but seven years Pete's senior, was already a University trustee. "I remember Harold urging Pete to join the Baptist Church so that he too could be a trustee," Carroll says. "By the 1930's, though, when Pete did become a trustee, one didn't have to be a Baptist."

Harold was Chairman of the Board when Robert M. Hutchins became Pres ident of the University. Like Willi am Rainey Harper, Hutchins (in Car roll's opinion) was "a daring, in dependent and creative thinker, es pecially good at cutting red tape

A very warm friendship developed be tween him and the Russells, and both joined the first Great Books group Hutchins and Mortimer Adler led.

Until Pete's death in the early 1950's, the Russells lived at 49th and Greenwood. Their children went to the Lab School and some attended

to page 6

S.P.I.A. RECORDS FOUND

In the last issue of the News letter we asked help in locating the records of the South Park Improve ment Association. Thanks to Margaret Walters we now have two photographs

c. 1905, a copy of the 1909 amended by-laws and a number of record books. Alan Barlow also contributed a 1951

list of members and their addresses.□

OUR RESTORATION FUND CONTINUES TO GROW

The goal, remember, was $45,000. We recently received $10,000 from the Field Foundation; earlier, $2500 from the Joyce Founda tion and $250 from Draper and Kramer. Generous individuals con tributed $4625 more. But the largest single arnount--$10,500--came from the Charter Members, each of whom gave $100, (in their own names or to memorialize loved ones); we list them below. We also say a warm "thank you" to all and happily announce that we are within $17,125 of reaching our goal. Renovation of our building at 5529 Lake Park Avenue should be underway by Spring.

Beatrice R. Adams Horace J. Adams Polly Adams

Mr. Adrian Alexander

Mr. and Mrs. A. T. Anderson Anderson Ace Hardware

The Douglas Anderson Family Robert Ashenhurst

W. James Atkins

Roland and Helen Bailey Muriel Beadle

Linda Diann Beeler

Mr. and Mrs. John A. Benade

Mr. and Mrs. Don Topkin Blackiston Robert J. and Alta Blakely

Jean Block

Walter and Natalie Blum

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Boodell, Jr. Mrs. Devereux Bowly

Devereux Bowly, Jr. Jesse and Carol Bradford

Congregation Isaiah Israel Mr. and Mrs. Arthur L. Conn Michael and Kathleen Conzen Mr. and Mrs. Paul A. Cornell

Mr. and Mrs. William F. Crawford Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Custer Albert and Thelma Dahlberg Kenneth and Marcia Dam

John and Betty Davey Josephine H. Davis Leon and Marian Despres Erl and Mildred Dordal

Anne C. and Allison Dunham Bernard E. Epton

Dr. and Mrs. A. Faller Martha and Stanton Friedberg William Gastineau

Mr. and Mrs. Paul G. Gebhard Louis and Julius Gerstein Ethel and Julian Goldsmith Mrs. Howard Goodman

Harry and Jean Gottlieb

Mr. and Mrs. Chauncy D. Harris Nadine Hild and Richard Hild Mrs. Ruth Horwich

Lester C. and Jean S. Hunt Gary E. Husted

The Hyde Park Cooperative Society The Hyde Park Herald

The Hyde Park Kiwanis Club The Hyde Park YMCA Center Mrs. Ralph C. James

Mr. and Mrs. D. Gale Johnson Mrs. Coleman J. Kelly Winston and Margaret Kennedy Kennedy, Ryan, Monigal and

Associates, Inc.

Mr. and Mrs. Maynard C. Krueger William and Norma Kruskal

Ross Lathrop

Mr. and Mrs. Gerhardt Laves Noble Wishard Lee

Kate and Edward Levi Mrs. Rose Chin Lipson

Philip R. and Dianne C. Luhmann Janet and David Midgley

Mrs. C. Phillip Miller Hans W. Morsbach

Mr. and Mrs. Victor Obenhaus Mr. and Mrs. Richard Orlikoff Dr. and Mrs. Walter L. Palmer Clarence Edward Parmenter and

Jane Parmenter Wilson

Thomas, Georgene and Gigi Pavelec Mrs. Howard R. Peterson

Robert, Rita and Kathleen Picken Louis B. Potter

Mr. and Mrs. James M. Ratcliffe George Edwin Richards and

Grace Buckle Richards

Dr. and Mrs. Henry T. Ricketts Dorothy Ringer

Jack L. Ringer

Mr. and Mrs. C. Roothaan Harriet W. Rylaarsdam

... from p.3 MORE CHARTER MEMBERS

Alice K. Schneider

Frank and Karen Schneider Elena Gould Schorr

Dr. and Mrs. J. Shanley-Brown Mr. and Mrs. Roger D. Shaw Richardson Spofford

Francis and Lorna Straus Mr. and Mrs. H. Strauss

Frances T. and King C. Stutzman Mrs. Gustavus F. Swift

Stephen and Marieanne Thomas William A. Thomas

L. Kristofer Thomsen Richard B. Truitt Patricia D. Walsh Marjorie Wasserman

Clyde and Cheryl Watkins George and Catherine Watkins Marvin H. Watkins

Mary-Ann Wayne

Mr. and Mrs. Warner Wick Milton W. Wright

icag

Times Art Column, Nov. 15, 1979:

Chicago's latest National Histor ic Landmark is St. Thomas the Apostle Church and Convent, 5472 Kimbark Ave. When it was completed in 1925, it was the first American modern-style Cath olic structure.

Its architect, Francis Barry Byrne, was the only apprentice mentioned by name in Frank Lloyd Wright's An Auto biography. "This boy stayed four years and turned out better than many who had many years the start of him in ev ery way."....

Alfonso Ianelli, who designed ab stract sculpture for Wright's Midway Gardens, worked closely with Byrne on terracotta decorations for the building. Inside, Alfeo Faggi created distinguished Stations of the Cross and a Pieta. D

In archival materials from one of the United Church of Hyde Park's predecessor churches, Carol Bradford found these minutes of the Friday Evening Club (men's literary society), February 18, 1895:

The literary program consisted solely of a debate on the ques tion "Resolved that the extension of the right of suffrage to wo men would be advantageous and expedient." Mr. Rugg opened on the affirmative and the secretary in the negative. Miss Helen Russ followed on the affirmative, but the secretary had been unable

to find any lady to assist him on the negative. A pathetic appeal to the ladies present failed to touch their sympathies and the discussion was thrown open to the house. The members of the club rallied nobly to the support of the secretary. Some of their re marks stirred the righteous indignation of the ladies and from that time on the discussion was quite animated. The President was unable to decide the question and had sufficient gallantry to re frain from putting it to a vote.

The club then adjourned and the members and guests remained to indulge in social intercourse and crown the animosities of debate in some of Mrs. Bender's hot chocolate.

J.C. Russ, Secretary D

Historic Sites Council Meets in Hyde Park

By Lesley Bloch

The gracious old Windermere was the perfect spot for December's pub lic meeting of the Illinois Histor ic Sites Advisory Council.

There, for two days and a night, members of the Council listened to presentations, viewed carefully cho sen slides and discussed the merits

nets and transports money to its balcony cashiers in baskets swung on pulleys. It is hoped that Na tional Landmark designation will prevent demolition of the building and its replacement by the State

Office Building proposed for the North Loop Redevelopment Project.□

of 43 properties in Chicago and elsewhere in the State. While own

ers, lawyers and interested others

awaited the final vote, specialists in the history of nails, woods, saws and Illinois testified as expert witnesses to the worthiness of the nominations.

At the morning session I attend ed, there were about 20 people in the audience. Heated discussion cen tered on the nomination to the Na tional Register by Devereux Bowly (wearing his Landmarks Preservation Council hat) of the Brooks Building at Jackson and Franklin.

The presence of a court reporter and a request by the building's law yer that action be deferred predict ed a continued fight for the life of the Brooks Building. Since National Landmark status means that proposed changes in the property are subject to Federal review--a situation which may work to the disadvantage of the owner--the owner of the Brooks Build ing wanted time to find an archi

tectural historian who would dis credit the building. But the re quest for a delay was denied and the nomination was approved.

So too was the nomination of the Clark and Barlow Hardware Store, which has been located at 123 w.

Lake St. for the past 85 years. In

days gone by, it was famous for its showcase windows on the second floor, their displays directed to the passing parade of El riders.

Clark and Barlow still dispenses its wares from grand old wood cabi-

... from p.1 NEW OFFICERS

with the legal firm of Hubachek, Kelly, Rauch & Kirby.

Of new chairmen of standing com mittees, two in particular should be mentioned:

Membership--Gerhardt Laves. It is his home address--5553 Kenwood- that now appears as the return ad dress on this Newsletter and it is to him that your dues should be sent. Born and raised in Hyde Park, he was a civilian employee of the police department until retirement.

Program--Tom Pavelec. A Conti nental Can Co. research technician specializing in plastics, he has lived in East Hyde Park for 3 1/2 yrs. and is active in St. Thomas parish.

Their outgoing counterparts- Jean Block, Devereux Bowly, Jr., Christine O'Neill, Richardson Spof ford, Betty Davey and Thelma Dahl berg deserve sustained applause

for their performance in office.□

IN 1905, THE S.P.C.A. MUST HAVE COMMENDED THE S.P.I.A.

By Devereux Bowly, Jr.

The Society has installed a gran ite horse trough, dating from about 1905, on the parkway at 1301 E. 57th St. {near Kirnbark).

The trough, which has the letters

Still the best buy in town: Mem bership in the Hyde Park Histori al Society--only $5.00 er year, which covers all members o a household.

Send your $5.00 check NOW, drawn to the Hyde Park Historical Society, to Gerhardt Laves, 5553 Kenwood Ave., Chicago 60637.o

SPIA carved in it, was originally in stalled on 57th St. a little east of its present location by the South Park Improvement Association, to serve the many horses in the area.

Last fall, Mrs. E. Hector Coates

The renovation of the Blackstone Branch Library proceeds more or less on schedule.

spotted the t ough_b hin a building The repairs and additions that n 57th St., ide tified it, and brought will make it function better--the i to he atte tion of the Hyde Park tuckpointing, the re-set masonry,

Historical Society. the new furnace, the air-condition-

The owners of the building, long time neighborhood realtors Margaret and Winston Kennedy, donated it to us. We cleaned it and installed it on a new concrete base in front of Staver Booksellers, itself a Hyde Park insti

tution.□

... from p.2 CARROLL RUSSELL

U High and the University. Carroll herself, now a North Sider, has wide interests and many talents. A dancer and actress of near-professional caliber, she was an enthusiastic participant in the Revels and the Faculty Wives shows. She has been a member of University visiting com mittees and many off-campus cultural and civic organizations.

When she had to give up dancing a couple of years ago and sought another mode of personal expression, she decided to attempt a biographi cal account of Harper and Hutchins. Friends urged her to make it a mem

oir of her own long association with the University and its people. She has found it difficult to write in the first person, however, and she still wants to talk with anyone who has anecdotes of Harper or Hutchins to share. Call her at MO 4-6271.D

ing throughout, the new fire alarm and smoke detector system, the new stage lights and other equipment in the auditorium--are in place or soon will be.

Now the focus has shifted to the ornamental details--to restoring the original beauty of the fabric. Items:

► The Tiffany glass dome {the on ly one in the library system outside the downtown Cultural Center) has been cleaned and backlighted.

► A professional marble cutter has been hired to clean all the in terior marble.

► An expert wood refinisher is undertaking the restoration and re waxing or varnishing of the mahog any wainscoting and library stacks.

► In the Circulation room, the handsome old drinking fountain has been reactivated. The solid mahog any Circulation desk has been dis mantled and the wood saved to use in repairing the wainscoting in the Periodical room.

► The mezzanine, believe it or not, is almost all bronze. {Go see

... to p.8

FROM THE WORLD"S FAIR TO URBAN

RENEWAL: what a nostalgia trip!

By Gladys Finn

"Hyde Park History on Show," held at Hyde Park Federal Savings on Sunday Nov. 11, brought such an outpouring of memorabilia that 3 to

5 p.m. was long enough only to glimpse the collection and leave a longing to see or read more. A sampling:

♦ A copy of the Nov. 1, 1893, Daily Inter-Ocean, headlining "The Story of The Midway Plaisance"; tinted lithographs of the World's Colwnbian Exposition; a colored photo of the 57th St. Art Colony and paintings of the same by Emil Armin and Marcella Lewin.

♦ A collection of photographs of the first-generation Swift family, recording reunions, graduations, an niversary parties, and such, which were collected by the youngest of Gustavus Swift's sons, Harold. In an 1899 family group, Harold him self is seen as an adolescent.

♦ A large and fascinating display of 19th and 20th century postcards of the community and the city; the Lab School Correlator of 1928 (when Janet Bowly and Edward Levi were in the graduating class); the Harvard School Review of May 1906 and an alumni re cord of 1880-1905; a handsome photo of the old, and now vanished, Winder mere West Hotel (first in the United States to have telephones in every room) alongside a photo of the Win dermere East ground-breaking.

♦ Exhibits by St. Thomas the A postle Church, by St. Paul and the Re· deemer and by the United Church of Hyde Park. The latter showed regis ters from the Hyde Park Presbyteri- an Church (founded 1860), the Hyde Park Congregational (1885) and the Hyde Park Methodist (1889), all now merged into the United Church.

An old Methodist ledger record ing a survey of neighborhood church preferences put the Presbyterians in the lead. One family responded to the poll, however, by saying that their preference was "nobody's bus iness," and the pollster dutifully reported the comment verbatim.

♦ A scrapbook documenting Hyde Park-Kenwood urban renewal from its inception; the Feb.25,1959,Hyde Park Herald headlining "Clearance Sched ule Imminent" and in lesser type, "750 Families Hit"; a collection of color slides recording decline and fall and rebuilding; sketches by Vi Fogle Uretz and Muriel Van Sweringin of the rows of doors that became the fencing for demolition areas.

For long-time community residents, the afternoon was an emotional as well as an historical event. One vet eran urban renewal activist was over heard to say, "This stuff makes me absolutely teary-eyed."

Among the exhibitors were these donors of historic materials: the Albert Dahlbergs, Alan and Jane Bar low, Bob and Molly Hauck, Eleanor Swift, Ted Anderson, Clyde Watkins, Alta Blakely, the Charles Borsts, Mrs. Lee B. Carrel, Howard Jackson, Herbert Ehrfurth, John McReynolds, Elizabeth Woellner, Anna Gwin Pick ens, Rosalia Isaacs, and Joe Marlin.

Eventually, these donations will be kept at our headquarters build ing. For now, they are stored else where. Thanks to all! D

Mrs. Miller Honored

Florence (Mrs. C. Phillip) Miller has received one of only 24 awards given nationally by the Interior Department's Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service, this for her work on behalf of restoration efforts in Historic Pullman. Mrs. Miller, a long-time Hyde Parker, is a grand

daughter of George M. Pullman.□

L£909 I 'ofiE rqJ

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.. .

BLACKSTONE LIBRARY IS REGAINING ITS ORIGINAL BEAUTY

from p.6

for yourself.) It was cleaned by hand, a job that took over three weeks. Now, in the words of Librar ian Emma Kemp, "It looks gorgeous."

► Above the mezzanine, extensive water damage to the plaster (from a formerly leaking roof) has been re paired and awaits the delivery of a casting from a section of the orig inal ceiling molding.

The Oliver D. Grover murals in the Rotunda may be restored later. The mosaic floor below them has been well looked after and is in fine condition. When the renovation is complete, this floor will be the only uncarpeted area in the library, so users will continue to enjoy its beauty.

Mrs. Timothy Blackstone, who gave the building to the city's library system in 1904, would be pleased by the loving care that is being given

to the renewal of this memorial to her husband.□

NEXT ISSUE: A report on the ren ovation of the Children's Wing.

--from notes by Irma Strauss

This Newsletter is published quarterly by the Hyde Park Histor ical Society.

Muriel Beadle, Editor Corinne Seither, Typing

Michael Conzen, Graphics

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®t:tlt®IT

Volume 2, Number 2 May, 1980

We Publicized Hyde Park and Made Money, Too

By Carol Bradford

The Hyde Park Historical Society was one of over 35 community groups represented at the CITY HOUSE Home Improvement Fair at Navy Pier on March 21, 22, and 23. Our booth featured photographs of historic Hyde Park homes and a grid map of the neighborhood. A variety of merchandise was on sale, including several books on Hyde Park and Chicago houses and architecture, note cards, T-shirts, and buttons. A flyer describing the Society and its

activities was available, and new members were solicited. Gross sales

Art Fair Founder Will

Speak at May Meeting

It's been 32 years since Mary Louise Womer organized the first 57th St. Art Fair, which returns again this year on June 7-8.

Mrs. Womer, now a resident of Valparaiso, Ind., is returning to Hyde Park, too--on Sunday, May 11, when she will share her recollec tions of Art Fair beginnings with members and friends of the Hyde Park Historical Society.

Did you know, for example, that the first 57th St. Art Fair (1948)

--which was also the first outdoor art fair in Chicago--occurred in Oc tober? That 50 artists exhibited?

That, as a group, they sold $500 worth of art and were astonished and thrilled to have done so well?

Since May 11 is Mother's Day and many of you will be dining out at noon, we've scheduled our meeting and program for 3 PM. The place, most appropriately, is the Hyde Park Art Center, 5236 s. Blackstone.

COME! Bring friends!

at the booth for the three days ex ceeded $375.

The purpose of CITY HOUSE, now in its second year, is to stimulate interest in and encourage the main tenance and restoration of the older homes (pre-1940) which make up the majority of Chicago's housing stock. The commercial exhibits at the Fair as well as the programs concentra ted on these purposes.

CITY HOUSE 1980 was a huge suc cess; about 40,000 people attended. Two Hyde Parkers were among those who spoke on relevant topics in the auditorium. Eliza Davey read Jean Block's paper on how to research the history of your home, and Alma Lach spoke on planning a workable kitchen in any kind of space.

* * *

As chairman of the CITY HOUSE Booth Committee for the HPHS, I want to thank all the Society members who worked to make our participa tion enjoyable and successful. Other

committee members were Emma Kemp, who set up the display; Lesley

... to page 2

Headquarters Renovation May Be Done by Fall

NOTE: May 11-18 is National Histor ic Preservation Week. This article is therefore especially apropos.

By Devereux Bowly, Jr.

This spring will see the start of renovation of the 1893 cable car station at 5529 Lake Park Ave., our future headquarters. We purchased the building in 1978 but postponed renovation until funds were raised to do most of the work.

The Hyde Park Historical Society will act as its own general contrac tor. We have engaged the Roy Ander son Company to clean and tuckpoint the exterior, repair interior and exterior foundation walls, and build a new chimney at the location of

the original one.

Robert Wolfe has been chosen to do the carpentry work, which is at least half the total job. A plumber has also been se ected and other tradesmen are being contacted. The major sequences of the work will be:

1) demolition of unusable interior components; 2) masonry repair; 3) rough carpentry;4)plurnbing;5)heat ing; 6) finished carpentry; and 7) furnishing.

Work is expected to be done by October, if our continuing fund raising efforts are successful. We are already gathering furnishings.

IF ANYONE WOULD LIKE TO DONATE a

rolltop desk, wooden file cabinet, or old office chairs, call Dev Bow ly at 667-2244.

HYDE PARK HOUSE TOUR

The Ancona Montessori School sponsors its second annual house tour on Sunday, May 18. Ten Hyde Park houses will be open to vis itors. Costs: $10. ($5 to senior citizens, students with ID, and children over eight. No children under eight will be admitted un less carried.) Get tickets in advance at the school, or at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club on May 18 between 1 and 5 PM.

This is one of many programs, tours, lectures, seminars and ex hibits scheduled between May 11 and May 18. For a complete list, call or write Greater Chicago Preservation Week Committee, 407

s. Dearborn, Suite 1705, Chicago

60607. Phone: 922-1742.

CITY HOUSE ... from page 1

Bloch, who assembled the photos; Phyllis Levin, in charge of the merchandising; and Jo Davis, who contacted volunteer workers. My special thanks to all of them.

In addition, the following mem bers of the Society worked at our booth: Gary Husted, Clyde Watkins,

CITY HOUSE was also of special val ue to this Newsletter. In addition to this article, you will find oth ers from the same source on pages 4, 5, 6 and 8.

Troy Baresel, Alta Blakely, John McDermott, Berenece Boehm, Paul and Dorothy Johnson, Marie Anne Thomas, Ann Boldenweck, Jesse Brad ford, Sue Davis, Michael and Kath leen Conzen, Bertha Kokurna, Dev Bowly, Betty Davey, Carol and Bert Benade, Ann Stevens, Adrian Alex ander, and Ken Levin.

Growing Up in Hyde Park Before World War I

"The Lake Was Our Constant Companion"

NOTE: Relative newcomers to Hyde Park may find it hard to believe that our popular former alderman wasn't always as awesomely erudite and politically sophisticated as he is today. But in fact, and as this memoir attests, Len Despres was once a child.

By Leon Despres

We were the first tenants in the beautiful new apartment build ing at 5488 Everett Avenue, built in 1911. When my parents took me at age 3 to inspect our new home,

I was disturbed at the prospect

of living in bare rooms with noth ing but carpenters' sawhorses in them. Somehow, though, while I was stowed with my Aunt Jennie, the familiar furniture was moved

from 4127 Michigan, and my parents, sister and I began four glorious years on Everett Avenue.

The shores of the Lake, which had not yet been filled in, reached as far as the present-day alley be tween Everett and South Shore Dr.

East of our home was open space with a few cottonwoods and, near 55th, the fisherman's shack where Captain Stephenson and his family lived. Captain Stephenson made his living from fish, which were still in good supply. In winter, he let his fellow captains beach their commercial fishing boats on the east side of Everett Avenue. The Lake was our constant companion.

All during the shipping season we heard the ore boats' ever-sounding fog horns, now replaced by radar.

For most of the day, the alley back of our building teemed with the movement and sounds of scissor grinders, umbrella menders, hurdy gurdies, German bands, peddlers, and horse-drawn wagons delivering groceries, milk, ice, coal, and de partment store purchases. The mail

came two or three times a day, de livered by Mr. Alexander Kemp.

A year or so after we moved in, East View Park opened, with only the apartment buildings on its west side. It was so attractive that on summer Sundays there was a guard at each sidewalk gate to block stran gers who wanted to use the East View Park beach. Proudly, I had the right to pass through because my aunt and uncle lived there and took me to their beach, where I learned to swim. They kept a canoe in the basement, which was portaged to

the beach.

Soon my parents enrolled me in Miss Thirza Riggs's kindergarten, and each morning a carriage driven by Mr. Brown came by, picking up children and transporting us to the Chicago Beach Hotel, at about 5050 East End Avenue. I have one of Miss Riggs's bills to my parents, which reads: "Kindergarten tuition (with carriage) for Sept. 24 to Oct. 18, 1912--$8.00."

In the fall of 1913, I entered the primer class of Elmwood School, a private enterprise operated by Miss Annie Fellows. Elmwood School boarders lived in an enormous white house at 5491 Cornell. But the day school was on the second floor at 1643 E. 53rd (where the IVI-IPO re cently concluded a successful elec toral campaign? I was taught to

... to page 5

THE HPHS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

thanks Michael Conzen for his contributions to the appearance of the Newsletter, and welcomes Cameron Poulter, who has taken over the setting of headlines and paste-up. Muriel Beadle continues as editor and Corinne Seither as typist. The Newslet ter is published quarterly.

Absent-Minded Dr. Egan Muddles a Prescription

PANES AND PLEASURES

From the 1916 Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Soci ety and via Jean Block, here's an anecdote about Dr. William B. Egan, the first great Kenwood landowner:

"Although by profession a phy sician, he was more given to real estate than to pills and potions. Once when prescribing for an old lady she asked him, 'How often am I to take this, Doctor?' The doc tor, who at the moment was think ing of his real estate, absently replied, 'Oh, a quarter dpwn. The balance canal time, one, two and three years'--the terms then much in vogue for land deals."

By Paul Johnson

Glass--bevelled, leaded, etched, in medieval rose and in late-Victor ian yellow--illuminated the darkened auditorium at Navy Pier and enchant ed hundreds of viewers at the CITY HOUSE exposition in March.

Displaying dozens of remarkable doors and windows, H. Weber Wilson drew on a lifetime of work in Arch itectural Ecology, leaving minds a glow with images--from the Middle

... to page 6

Sorry It Took So Long, Mrs. Dickey

NOTE: When Hyde Park celebrated its 50th Jubilee, a historical exhibit was created by Alice Manning Dickey. She also wrote the following editorial, which was published in the Hyde Park Herald. The date? September 14, 1939.

"Celebrating a community Jubilee turns one's thoughts back ward, and out of Hyde Park's intensive celebration has been born a vivid interest in our beginnings. Our Historical Exhibit ... is being displayed, through the fine and public-spirited cooper ation of the University of Chicago, in the Reynolds Club, Uni versity Avenue and 57th Street ... People have come forward with

... pictures of the first homes, the first church, the first bank, the first post office, the first school, the first store, with furniture of the period, music books, china, costumes, por traits, all of which should bring us a better understanding of the kind of people who were Hyde Park's ancestors, of the fine neighborly responsible life that was lived here and which be queathed to us a progressive growing community ....

"The spirit which has been aroused during this week of cel ebration and reminiscence we hope may result in the formation of a permanent Hyde Park Historical Society in which our

knowledge of ... the first residents of Hyde Park, and of all who have come after to work for fuller opportunities and advantages for all its citizens, may be available to the generations which shall follow us. A Historical Society can take and preserve the picture of each phase of a community's life, commemorating its notable citizens and events ... building up a strong civic in terest and a relationship which should be like that of a big but close-knit family. May it come into permanent being."

Dick and Jane Will Like New Children's Wing

By Lesley Bloch Blackstone Library Renovation Nearing Completion Come summer, a spacious, shelf-lined, yellow-walled, air-conditioned

environment will greet the children of our community when they enter the newly refurbished Blackstone Branch Library.

Although only the deacon benches, display cases and the fine oak paneled ceiling remain from the Children's Wing as we have known it, the renovation has retained a feeling of respect for the architects and their conception of a public building.

AT CITY HOUSE, awards were given for noteworthy restoration or adap tive re-use. In the multi-unit build ing category, The Powhatan (4950 Chicago Beach Dr.) received a Merit Award. The HPHS made the nomination, having already given its Paul Cor nell Award to the same project.

The Children's Collection began in 1904 as a non-circulating one. It was located in what later be came the Periodicals Room. Within its first four years, however, a circulating collection and a read ing club came into being.

In 1939, the Children's Wing was added--thanks to the Public Works

DEPRES ... from page 3 Administration and Charles Hodgdon and Sons, architects. Until 1959,

read there, where others have just been taught to vote for Braun, Cur rie, Dobry and Washington.) Grades from primer to third were in the south room under Miss Ryan, while grades four to eight were in the north room under Miss Fellows.

In February, 1914, I transferred to the "Little Ray" school at 56th and Stony Island, a branch of Ray School now supplanted by Bret Harte. It was a four-room school, built for exhibition at the 1893 World's Fair. Since it was not equipped with buz zers, it gave me my first experi ence with the peals of a school bell. How I wished I might be allowed to ring the recess bell, but that nev er happened. The Little Ray gave

me something far more valuable--my first contact with black children as peers. The 1917 residential seg

regation pattern had not yet been im posed on Chicago, and black families who had settled on Lake Park Avenue sent children to public school.

In 1915 we moved to 5509 Hyde Park Boulevard. I missed Everett Avenue, especially the beautiful winter sun rises that streamed into our sunpar lor from the unobstructed horizon over my Lake.

this existed as a separate facil ity for children, with its own en trance, circulation system and li brary cards.

When the current renovation is finished, old programs such as the Buddy to Buddy Reading Program, Sto ry Hour and Children's Films will

be reactivated. Sharon Gunn, the new Children's Librarian, is in the process of rebuilding the collec tion for pre-schoolers, replacing well-worn favorites and stocking new titles.

Armed with books, plans for com munity outreach, a variety of pro grams and a modernized facility, Emma Kemp and her staff expect to revitalize the community's faith in the Blackstone Branch and make reading a habit for everyone.

FINALISTS in the Chicago Metro History Fair--a program encouraging high schoolers to do research on fam ily or community history--will be on display at the Public Library Cul tural Center from May 14 to 18.

A HARD WAY TO MAKE $100

Betty Davey has been reading

T.W. Goodspeed's History of the Hyde Park Baptist Church.(1924) Here's how they raised some mon ey in 1882:

"Someone suggested we open an ice cream parlor on the lot [northeast corner of Lake Park and 53rd]... A large tent was leased for a month and Mrs.R.R. Donnelley, a member of this church and well known in Bap tist circles, agreed to take charge of the enterprise. Ev ery afternoon, excepting 'sun days, for a month, she, with the help of other ladies of the church, attended to this busi ness. Some of the men looked after it evenings. Mrs. Donnel ley turned over $100...as the net profits of this business."

STAINED GLASS from page 4

Ages to Frank Lloyd Wright's "Mis sion Modern."

For some, the program was a trip in fantasy to what their own house could become. For others, it was a primary education, as Wilson noted that "jewels" are small circles of intense color; distinguished the rectangular "nee-classical" from the flowing and leafy Art Nouveau; differentiated between true stained glass and "silver-stained" glass; and explained the acid-etching pro cess.

For many, it was a first encoun ter with the neglected history of native American residential glass, from 1860 to 1930. Weber is an au thority on that topic and has writ ten Your Residential Stained Glass, A Practical Guide to Repair and Maintenance. For information about its cost and availability, write Mr. Wilson at 447 E. Catherine St., Chambersburg, PA 17201, or call Chicago's Landmarks Preservation Council at 744-3200.

Beware Synthetic Siding Materials on Old Frame Houses

By Bert Benade

Inasmuch as appreciation of old er styles of architecture is more and more reflected in higher real estate appraisals, it pays to know the effects of using modern syn thetic materials on outside walls.

The following notes are from in formation garnered at CITY HOUSE- much of it from a talk by John My ers of the U.S.Interior Dept., an architect with the Technical Pre servation Services.

Siding or sheathing has been a round a long time. Frame buildings normally used only wood covering and in only two ways: long narrow boards mounted either horizontally or vertically, or shingles over lapped in rows. The shapes of the boards and sringles were chosen to complement the architectural fea tures of Lhe building.

When considering what to do with a frame building more than 30 years old, there are two choices: restor ation or rehabilitation. Restora tion means replacing with exact du plication and no compromise; it is the difficult and expensive way to go. Rehabilitation means fixing up as best you can, keeping your aes thetic sensitivity alert. Without sensitivity you will likely lose some economic value. You will also sense the imbalances introduced by ill-considered changes, even if you can't pinpoint them.

Aluminum, vinyl or other syn thetic materials are often used as siding. These come in many differ ent forms, some trying to copy the

... to page 8

THE CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDA

TION (phone 782-1776) offers occa sional Loop tours for children 6 to

12. The inspired title: "Put Your Arms Around a Building."

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ...

NOTE: Robert Todd Lincoln was the eldest and only son of Abraham Lincoln who lived to adulthood. He was an important man in his own right: a successful Chicago lawyer (he was the "Lincoln" of Isham, Lincoln and Beale) and public servant (U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James) and a millionaire.

Even so, he watched his expenditures carefully--as the letter below makes clear. For permission to quote it, we are indebted to James T. Hickey of the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield. The letter was dated Nov. 28, 1899, and was writ ten to H.O. Nourse, Superintendent of Chicago's Water Department.

My Dear Sir:

I think you know that I have been much annoyed by what I think is a great over-rating of the consumption of water at my house, No. 60 Lake Shore Drive. I have had the matter most care fully gone over. In August last, a leak in the supply pipe be tween the meter and the house was discovered and closed. Since then, although my house until recently has not been occupied, ex cept by a care-taker, my monthly bills indicate a consumption of

... about 100 barrels a day at 50 gallons a barrel. This, of course, is impossible.

This morning I had the plumber come again. He carefully saw that all the faucets in the house were closed and ... observed

the meter for fifteen or twenty minutes, during which time it reg istered no flow. He then, under my supervision, filled a bath tub with water. During this operation, the meter was going vigorously. When the tub was filled and the faucet closed, the meter stopped working. It had registered 47 cubic feet, or 352 1/2 gallons. I then measured the bath tub with a foot rule, and calculated that it contained 6 1/2 cubic feet, or 48 3/4 gallons of water. I then

had the water dipped out ... and it measured in this way 48 gallons. This seems to show clearly that the meter is registering about seven times the amount of water passing through it, and its record cer tainly shows that it has been doing the same good work, at least since August.

I will be obliged if you will send an expert to my house, say tomorrow morning at half past eight, ... to repeat the same ex periment I had made this morning. If a similar result is reached,

I suppose that a new meter should be put in, and that I should be given a rebate on my recent bills....

Yours very truly, ROBERT T. LINCOLN

Lc;a;e-y

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From page 6

SYNTHETIC SIDINGS MERELY POSTPONE FINAL DAY OF RECKONING

look of wood. They all have draw backs when applied to frame houses. None should be used to cover weak nesses and bad spots in an existing wall, because the basic problems- though temporarily hidden--remain.

Vinyl sidings get very brittle in cold weather and break easily. Aluminum sidings dent easily and soon look banged up. None of the synthetics are cost-effective in insulation value. If you use a va por barrier just inside the new covering, humidity will wreck the interior walls and allow fungus to grow and rot to develop. The much touted new venting techniques are not effective, especially during the winter.

Guarantees should be gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Who honors them, the dealer or the maker? What

exactly is covered? What about the labor costs of replacement? Some makers offer SO-year guarantees, but the real value of replacement drops off very rapidly after the first two or three years.

The final point in this summary is aesthetic. To cover up beautiful and historically interesting detail ing with modern, mass-produced sid ing can destroy the building's char acter. Even when you are replacing wood with wood, you should search diligently for forms and textures that are compatible with the siding originally used.

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®t:tlt®IT

Volume 2, Number 3 August, 1980

Ne\V Publication Debuts

By Lee H. Morgan

Hyde Park History No. 1, an 84- age paperb und volume of essays and excerpts·from primary source materials, made its_debut at he_57th St. Art Fair in June. It is the work of a HPHS committee consisting of Michael Conzen (chairman), Kathleen Conzen, Rory Shan ey- rown, and Albert Tannler. Its objective--and that of other public ti ns planned for the future--is "to further understanding and appreciation of our community's historical development and present character."

In "Electric Commuting and a Cleaner Hyde Park," Paul Stanford notes that the 1926 electrifica tion of the IC (which eliminated from the air the smoke and cinders belched out by steam engines) in creased real estate values in East Hyde Park as much as 500 percent. By 1928 the average rental was more than $50 per month (as opposed

to the citywide average of $17 per month).

In "Hyde Park Versus the Tavern," Damon Darlin introduces the reader to the Hyde Park Protective Asso ciation, founded in 1893, its pur pose being to get rid of the tav erns that were proliferating in

the community.

The Protective Assn. was canny; it appealed to self-interest rather than morality. It said, "The saloon in residence streets cuts down the market value of our homes [and] en dangers their security. [It] fur nis4e nine-te,pths of the work of our police and justice courts, in creases our taxes, is and always

... to page 2

From page 1

"HYDE PARK HISTORY NO. l" TELLS OF FIGHT AGAINST TAVERNS; ALSO VOTE

ON 1899 ANNEXATION TO CHICAGO

has been the center of official corruption."

This watchdog group didn't ac complish much more than to contain the taverns within the area on Lake Park between 54th and 56th Streets. There, in the 1920's, a thirsty man could choose among 15 to 20 bars in each block.

Does this have a faintly famil iar ring? It should have, for the South East Chicago Commission [see story elsewhere in this Newsletter]

also took a dim view of taverns. In

from Clara Louise Burnham's Sweet Clover: A Romance of the White Ci

.:!:Y (1894). It is part of a long r excerpt, one of several from dif ferent sources. Tucked between the essays by Stanford, Darlin, and Markun (all of them recent gradu

.ates of the University of Chicago College) these inserts leaven the scholarly prose of the essays.

To order Hyde Park History N

1 by mail, send i:.:1e coupon below, with your check, to our treasurer. If you don't want to cut into the Newsletter, make a facsimile.

• •••••••

To Gary Husted, 4900 Ellis, Chicago, IL 60615

I am enclosing a check for

due course it rid the community of

$ ,drawn to Hyde Park

46 bars.

Historical Society. Please

* send me

copies of

Paul Markun's "Village Problems and City Solutions" analyzes the forces at work in 1889, when Hyde Park voted 5-3 for annexation to the city of Chicago.

"Hyde Park" was then composed of 20-odd hamlets under one governmen tal umbrella. Its area stretched from 39th St. on the north to 138th St. on the south, from State St. on the west to Lake Michiqan on the

east. Present-day Hyde Park-Kenwood, then called the Village Center, was a rich suburban enclave, and its res idents voted against annexation.

At opposite social and economic poles were the industrial towns of South Chicago and Grand Crossing, and the agricultural towns of Rose land and Kensington. Hoping they'd get better municipal services if they were part of Chicago, they vo ted overwhelmingly for annexation.

--thereby "placing [the Village Center's] reluctant hand in that of mother city."

The phrase in quotes above is

Hyde Park History No. 1 (at

$3.85 to members of the So city, $4.85 to others).

Name

Address

••••••

_WATKINS ... from page 1

eral Chicago foundations: a $10,000 challenge grant from the Field Foun dation of Illinois (payable when we reach our goal), $5,000 from the Joseph and Heldn Regenstein Foundation; and $2,500,from the Joyce Foundation.

We are grateful to all supporters of the Hyde Park Historical Society and look forward to ce ebrating the successful completion of both the fund drive and the renovation pro ject in October. In the meantime, keep an eye on work in progress at 5529 Lake Park Ave.

By Muriel Beadle

"In 1905, all four of us Lowden children had the measles, and I had pneumonia as well. The doctor urged Mother to take us to Lakewood [New Jersey] to recuperate. Lakewood was part resort and part spa; it was fa mous for its pure air. That's where I first saw Dr. Harper. I remember him sitting in a rocking chair on the veranda of a Lakewood hotel, con valescing from his first cancer operation."

The speaker is Florence Lowden Miller {Mrs. C. Phillip Miller), grand daughter of industrialist George M. Pullman, daughter of a Governor of Illinois, wife of a distinguished scientist and physician, and in her own right one of Hyde Park's {and Chicago's) great movers and doers.

Harper

HEADQUARTERS PROGRESS REPORT

Devereux Bowly, Jr. advises: Don't just drive past our head

quarters building at 5529 Lake Park. Walk there, so you can stop and look and appreciate the restoration of the brickwork to its original color, a lovely coppery rose.

When the building was a hash house, its owners painted the exter ior fire-engine red, several thick coats of it. To strip the stuff off required 64 man-hours of hand labor. That job was completed in June, as was the tuckpointing and the repla cing of several courses of brick.

By the time this Newsletter is printed and delivered, the back and side windows and the new floor will be in place. When the project is completed, the handsome arched win dow frames will still be there, but the sash will be new and the doors will have been rebuilt.

We're anticipating an· official opening in October and.hope that members and friends will help us furnish the place. We'd like to have, as of the 1890's or early 1900's:

. A roll-top desk

. Wooden office files

. Wooden office chairs

. Wood-burning stove

. Dr•inking fountain

Her reference above to "Dr. Har per" is, of course, to William Rai ney Harper, the Unive sity's first President, who died in 1906. Now 82, Mrs. Miller has first-hand rec ollections of all but one of the University's chief executives. Be low, from a recent interview, are more memories:

Judson

Eight or nine years after the Lakewood visit, Florence met Harr·y Pratt Judson, Harper's successor and that meeting wasn't in Chica- go either. It occurred at Pullman Island, in the St. Lawrence River, where the Lowdens were vacation ing. {Their home, earlier.on Prai rie Ave. in Chicago, was by 1913 at Sinissippi Farm on the Rock River.)

Bear in mind that Florence's father, Frank 0. Lowden, was about to run for the governorship, and that Judson was a political scien tist. His wife did not accompany him to Pullman Island, which sug gests that Judson's visit was es sentially a "working" holiday.

But there was time for relaxa tion too. Judson went fishing one day, and Florence kept him company. Their conversation, as was appro priate for a schoolgirl and a pro fessor, centered on geometry. She remembers Judson as a medium-sized man whose sparse hair was almost

... to page 4

From page 3

MASON WAS "CHARMING," HUTCHINS "INTIMIDATING," KIMPTON "WARM AND KIND"

white and whose mustache drooped over his upper lip "and sometimes had to be puffed out of the way."

The period just before World War I was quite an era. If, like the Lowdens and the Pullmans, one belonged to Mid-America's aristo cracy, life could be sweet. That

summer, the Lowdens rented a house boat which their yacht (manned by a crew of seven) towed on a cruise

around the Rideau Lakes in Ontario. The children lived on the house

rolled in 1929 as a special stu dent. "I found the collegiate life very exciting," she says, remem bering with pleasure the football luncheons that the Hutchinses host ed before the Maroons' home games. (President Hutchins' antipathy to football developed later.)

The Millers were married in 1931 and became Hyde Park householders in 1937. They dined occasionally at the President's House, but Mrs.

Miller was.not as .comfortable in

boat: the adults, including Pres ident Judson, on the yacht.

Burton

Judson served from 1907 to 1923, the second-longest tenure of any of the University's presidents. His successor, Ernest D. Burton, had

one of the shortest terms (1923 to 1925). He was the only president whom Florence never met. That's odd, for her father was a Trustee and she had wide acquaintance in University circles. One of her best friends was Elizabeth Wallace1 who taught French literature.

Mason

Max Mason also had a short term (1925 to 1928). Mrs. Miller remem-

·bers him well, for she "fell vic tim to his charm." He was a dynamic man, "alive-looking" and personable; "he made you feel that University life was fun." He charmed the fac ulty too, by approaching any table at the Quadrangle Club with an emp ty place, saying, "I'm Mason. May

I sit here?"

Hutchins

The president with the longest tenure--22 years--was Robert May nard Hutchins, who was 29 when he took office in '29. Florence Low den was not only his contemporary in age but in formal affiliation with the University, for she en-

Hutchins' company as she might have wished. "He was an intimidating man," she says. "Always ten jumps ahead of you. He made so many quips you felt you had to keep up with him and you tried to be equally clever

yourself. But no one could match him."

Kimpton

Then, in 1951, Hutchins resigned and Lawrence Kimpton became presi dent. As with Judson and Burton be fore him, Kimpton was a member of the faculty and a sometime adminis trator--and this may be why he did not stir people up as Harper and Hutchins had done. Mrs. Miller was fond of him ("He was a warm person, and kind.") and is one of those who feels that local lore doesn't give Kimpton as much credit as ·is due to him for his role in stabilizing the College and safeguarding the Univer sity and the community through the· urban renewal·project.

The presidents who served from 1961 onward are all alive, so this account of Mrs. Miller's recollec tions will end with Kimpton

THIS NEWSLETTER appears quarter ly. We have lost Cameron Poulter1s help with the graphics, but have ac quired the services of Ruth Grodzins. Muriel Beadle continues to edit it and Corinne Seither to type it.

Community Marks End

of Eta as Julian

Levi Leaves SECC

Since 1952, Julian Levi ha been the executive director of the South East Chicago Commission, founded in that year by Hyde Parkers concerned about the deterioration of the neigh borhood. He was a designer of the subsequent urban renewal project and the person most responsible for its success.

Now he has retired from his law professorship at the University (to accept a similar appointment at the Hastings Law School in San Francis co) and from the SECC. His departure is more than Hyde Park's loss. To quote a Hyde Park Herald editorial:

"Levi, one of the most colorful and controversial figures on the public scene, will be sorely missed. He may be one of a dying breed: a man who put his formidable talents and his larger than life personality at the service of the community,

the university and the city without thought of profit."

To pay him homage was the reason for the huge turnout at the SECC's annual dinner on June 9. It would have been impossible to have crammed one more person into Hutchinson Com mons. Among them were city officials, judges, aldermen, leading businessmen

--a significant sampling of Who's Who in Chicago.

A representative of Gov. James Thompson announced that the Governor had proclaimed June 9 "Julian Levi Day" in Illinois. A representative of the Richard J. Daley family read a letter of tribute from the late Mayor's widow. SECC Board member Norman Mac Lean reminisced wittily about the Levi years. Lewis HilL now head of the RTA, claimed Hyde Park as his Second home because of

his former chairmanship of the De partment of Urban Renewal.

The Rev. Arthur Brazier of The Woodlawn Organization, co-recipient with Julian Levi of the 1977 Rocke feller Public Service Award but his bitter foe at one time, spoke

movingly of the growth of their mu tual respect and friendship. Bruce Sagan, whose Hyde Park Herald often "fought pitched battles" with Levi, quoted some of his harsher words and symbolically ate them.

In responding to all this, Jul ian Levi charmed the audience with family anecdotes. For example:

"I will never forget Mayor Daley's smile when he recalled that he had learned to swim at old Sinai Commu nity House at 46th and (then) Grand Blvd., when Emil Hirsch [Julian Le vi's grandfather] was the Rabbi. And I was surprised at his knowing that the same Emil Hirsch, as President

of the Chicago Public Library Board, had placed the corner3tone of the building at Randolph and Michigan .'1

Finally, the guest of honor told the crowd that in the late summer of 1952 he and his wife had bought a large trunk in anticipation of

their moving to San Francisco. "That trunk has sat empty for 28 years in a closet on the third floor of our house," he said. "But now t e time has come for it to fulfill its des tiny."

'Twas a grand farewell.

-- Muriel Beadle COMINGS AND GOINGS

After Tom Pavelec resigned as Program Chairman, Thelma Dahlberg and Betty Davey stepped into the breach. Now a new Program Chair man has taken over: Berenece Boehm, known to many of you for her long devotion to the Hyde Park Neigh borhood Club through its Business and Professional Women's Auxili ary. At her office, she1s the Administrative Assistant to the president of Northwest Industries.

October showing planned

United Church Finds 1910 Lantern Slides

By Carol Bradford

In early May 1910, the Hyde Park Presbyterian Church observed its 50th anniversary. Numerous special events were planned, among them several his toric addresses which were illustra ted with specially-prepared lantern slides. These slides were recently rediscovered in the archives-of the United Church of Hyde Park.

The church is again planning com memorative activities, this time to celebrate its formation in 1930 as a merger of the Presbyterian Church and the University Congregational Church and the 10th anniversary of its merger with the Hyde Park Meth odist Church. The 1910 slides will be shown at the church on Saturday, Oct.4, at 10:30 AM and 2:00 PM,along with highlights of the historic ad dresses they originally accompanied.

Both the slides and the talks in clude valuable information about ev eryday life in early Hyde Park. In the 19th century, churches were cen ters of village social activit½ and the Presbyterian Church and St.Paul's Episcopal were the first churches or ganized here. They shared a s all

wooden chapel located in a grove of oak trees near what is now 53rd and Lake Park.

DO YOU HAVE a friend or neighbor who might like to join the Hyde Park Historical Society and support our activities?

Membership forms are available at the Blackstone Branch Library or from our Membership Chairman, Ger hardt Laves, 5553 Kenwood Avenue, Chicago 60637.

And if you haven't yet sent him your $5.00 dues for 1980, DO IT NOW. Make checks payable to the Hyde Park Historical Society.

The Presbyterians met on Sunday mornings for worship service, the Episcopalians in the afternoon. In the winter, each group provided its own supply of wood for the stove.

Legend has it that one cold Sunday the Episcopalians were forced to cancel their service because the Presbyterians had burned all their wood. A mock trial was held later, with a prisoner brought in dragging a log to which he was chained.

Every year on the Fourth of Ju ly, there was a picnic·at the foot of 53rd St., at which the Presbyter ian Ladies Aid sold lemonade. Once, when the weather was very hot and the supply of ice ran short, the women took some of the ice used to make ice cream to cool the lemon ade. Though they washed the salt off as best they could, the lemon ade was salty enough to make every one thirsty. So they sold more lem onade than ever before.

Perhaps it was a twinge of con science that motivated the women to alternate the lemonade sale with the Episcopal ladies in following

years.

If you make entries ·on your so-

cial calendar two months in advance, jot down Oct. 4, for the historic slide show at the United Church.

Good Sho\1/: ''Old House\1/orks''

By Lesley Bloch

To accompany your lunch of a Saturday, there is a half-hour program on Channel 11 at 12:30 called "Old Houseworks" that people interested in do-it-yourself rehabbing might enjoy. The series is produced by the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting and will be on the air through mid-October.

The host, Bob Callahan--appropriately dressed in work clothes and placed in a dusty "projects to be finished" environment--is very effec tive. He mixes feigned ignorance of remodeling techniques with the knack of asking just the right questions. Here's a summary of one prog am, No.

11 in the series: It began with the questions: Are

there waterproof wood fillers?" and "How do Georgian and Federal archi

A Sharp Man,

Mr. Gray!

Editor's note: Anna (Mrs. Howard) Goodman, when recently sorting fam ily papers, found a manuscript copy of a business history by Bernard Drill. Dated 1939, it is entitled "Herbert Goodman and the Goodman Manufacturing Company." She en joyed this excerpt and so should other HPHS members.

Bear in mind that Herbert Good man was Howard's father; that the "vacant lot" mentioned below is the site of the Robie House; and that Herbert Goodman's house was one of two on the land where McGiffert Hall now stands.

"In the autumn and winter of 1906, Herbert Goodman endured an experi ence that demonstrated the extent

of his community spirit.

"The house which he had recent ly purchased from Charles L. Hunter stood adjacent to a vacant lot on the northeast corner of 58th and Woodlawn Ave. In order to protect his purchase, Mr. Goodman had se cured from Mr. Hunter a pledge that no apartment building would ever be erected on the vacant corner lot.

... to page 8

tecture differ?" These inquirles were thoroughly answered, using dem onstrations for the first and photo graphs for the second.

Then Bob Calahan was joined by Gil Brooks, a master carpenter, who knocked out a wall in an older home. If this is something you have been thinking about doing and have put off because it is just too much, be reassured. The job is manageable

if done thoughtfully with the right tools, time and patience in your pockets, and an eye out for salvage able remains.

The concluding minutes of the half hour were given over to a dis cussion of the dangers of lead poi soning. Lead is found in·90 percent of houses built before 1950. Lodged in paint, varnish and putty, it ap pears in the dust surrounding the exterior of a painted house and can fill the air of a room in the pro cess of being sanded.

Symptoms of lead poisoning can be mistaken for the flu or exhaus tion from a job finally done. A test for lead in the blood is the only way of really knowing. So the best approach is to wear a mask, remove all furniture from the room, ven tilate it well, keep pregnant women and young children away, and never eat on the job.

7 .

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From page 7

DID GRAY SERIOUSLY INTEND TO BUILD THOSE SHOPS, OR WAS MONEY HIS GOAL?

"Hunter subsequently sold this land to Mr. John M. Gray, of Chi cago, subject to this restriction. Abiding only by the letter of the proscription, Gray decided to build seven small shops on the property. For this purpose the material was delivered and work on foundations was begun.

"Thereupon the whole neighbor hood became aroused, and Gray, if that had not been his original pur pose, sensed the opportunity to make a good thing out of his ven ture. To thwart the consummation

of these plans, Herbert Goodman and one of his neighbors, Mr. Charles Mason, finally bought up the prop erty, though at a price consider ably in excess of its real worth.

"He wished that he could take permanent title to the entire vac ant tract next to his own house but, as he wrote to his brother in-law, 'I am hardly yet able to cultivate a neighborhood park for the benefit of myself and the ad jacent property holders.'"

URBS IN HORTO AS OF 1899

In their 1899 Annual Report, the South Parks Commissioners included these notes: "Owing to the increasing demand for great er lawn area for visitors to Washington Park, the territory on which hay is made is reduced somewhat each year, so that this year the crop yielded only 46 tons of hay. 11

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®(t(t®rr

Volume 2, Number 4 November, 1980

WHAT A PARADE! WHAT A DEDICATION!

By Lesley Bloch

The Hyde Park Historical Society/Community Halloween Parade pulled itself together on the chilly afternoon of Oc tober 26, in the vacant lot adjacent to the Mu'rray School, and marched off in more than 30 groups of participants. Cub Scout den flags fluttering, Children's Choir conductor arms flapping, cold coming through the soles of our shoes, and all

a bit out of step, we paraded behind a fine pair of Police De partment horses and officers.

The Spiritual Reader/Advisor on 53rd near Dorchester looked down from her second floor window to see:

oAn elegant lady of yesteryear in a robin's egg blue chif fon gown, white fur cape, sequined and feathered hat, fan dangling;

oThe familiar meat department man from the Coop in real moustache, white hard hat and apron, accompanied by a little girl in face paint and Halloween costume;

oAn assortment of clowns miming, unicycle riding, waving; and a double-decker bus from McCormick Inn;

oThe School of Hard Knocks in academic robes;

oLoose balloons soaring high, others still attached to wrists; oThe UNICEF man clothed in a violet Moroccan caftan,

capped by Uzbekistan, pursed by Greece, beaded by India and an undefined nation;

oDogs-dogs riding backwards on a three-wheeled bike, sauntering along, waiting on a corner to join up with small sheeted ghosts and black plastic caped and masked witches;

oTwo somber antique automobiles, and a marching band; oThe hardiest majorettes ever, in abbreviated white sleeve

less tops and short red-spangled skirts, twirling, stepping high; oAnother lovely lady all in black and beads;

oThe Gilbert and Sullivan Players regal in stature, yet ever so neighborly in reality;

oAII the rest of us bringing up the rear.

Dedication Ceremonies

When the patriotically crepe-papered and ribbon-barred front door of the HPHS Headquarters came in view, the parade made an easy turn at 56th and Lake Park, protected , from auto traffic by three Kenwood Academy Porn Porn girls at the barricade. The crowd soon grew to 400 cold but cheer ful people, moving closer to that proud little building, once again in good shape.

Speeches by Clyde Watkins (in an impressive derby), by Jean Block and by Leon Despres placed this event in the history of the community. Thanks were given to John Vinci, the restoration architect; to Jane Hood of the Illinois Human ities Council, which financed the current exhibit, and to the people who researched it, assembled the material and mounted it [see story p.3] . Greetings were offered to Larry Bloom,

Carol Moseley Braun, Barbara Currie and Alan Dobry-all present and wearing smiles.

A University of Chicago student purposefully wandered through the crowd selecting persons to be part of a class pro ject in-family history, slipping index cards with a phone num ber and "Please call tonight" into chilly hands on their way to the pockets. The popcorn wagon stoked up its fire. The cider was poured. The sales table (mostly HPHS publications) was set up. People said, "Greetings! greetings! ", "Isn't this ex citing?" and "Let's see what they have with the popcorn."

"Much Good Humor"

The ribbon across the building's door was cut. A group photo of the Society's Board of Directors, and whoever else wanted to be included, was taken. Mrs. C. Phillip Miller, in pink, joined the line to view the building and the exhibit. Bill Veeck dropped by. In the sun-filled main room, the paneling looked splendid. The windows sparkled. The ticket seller's cage appeared to be authentic. And the 36-star Ameri can flag looked just right on the south wall.

Authenticity the Keynote

Headquarters Carefully and Lovingly Renovated

By Muriel Beadle

"It's a little jewel", said one participant in the October 26 dedication of our headquarters at 5529 Lake Park Avenue. Indeed it is-and the credit goes primarily to HPHS President Clyde Watkins, who "found" the place, secured it, and headed the fund-raising campaign; and to Board member Devereux Bowly Jr., who acted as general contractor. His insistence upon authenticity of design and excellence of craftsmanship

is everywhere apparent.

An earlier Newsletter reported on the cleaning of the ex terior brickwork. Here now are some notes on the interior of our renovated 1893 cable car station:

About 10,000 linear feet of 4-inch tongue and groove paneling was used on the walls. Because the or.iginal paneling was fir, seldom used now, ours had to be specially ordered. However, pine was used for the trim. It wasn't easy to blend maple and walnut stains so the two woods would match; in fact, Dev says, it took 12 tries. The effort was more than successfu I.

Some Things Old, Some Things New The new floor (a beauty I) is red oak.

The rear windows, frames and sash, are custom-made re productions of the originals, but the frames of the front win dows were salvageable and only the sash is new. Thermopane was installed, however, and since it weighs more than glass the original sash weights were too light. Therefore, supple mentary weights have been added.

The light fixtures combine wrought iron parts correct for the 1890s but newly made to our order, plus antique white globes purchased locally. An antique dealer also provided the metal grille (from an old post office in Indiana) which divides the ticket office from the waiting room.

The bathroom includes a toilet with a wooden tank, numerous nice old wall fixtures (lovingly repaired by Board member Ted Anderson), and a marble-decked wash basin.

. he furnace is in the attic. It will be turned low, main taining temperatures in the forties, when the building is not in use. Under the same circumstances, the electric hot water heater will be turned off.

Unobtrusive Meters

Because of the historic nature of the building, the Peoples Gas Co. bent its rules and installed its meter in the attic in stead of on the face of the building. Commonwealth Edison, similarly cooperative, installed its meter on the north wall of the building, higher than is usual.

One of the most appropriate touches is the telephone num ber: HY 3-1893.

The building will be open (at least for now) only on Satur days from 10 a.m. to noon, on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m., and by appointment. To make an appointment, call Emma Kemp at the Blackstone Library 624-0511.

P.S. We went a bit over our budget. If you can contribute, or know someone who might, call Clyde Watkins.

HEAR YE!

Here are announcements of particular importance to Hyde Park Historical Society members:

DUES ARE NOW PAYABLE. The Board of Directors re grets the necessity but must now ask $10 per year. (The rise in cost of mailings and of Newsletter production is primarily responsible.) Your HPHS membership is still a good buy, how ever, since it includes everyone in your family. Send your check, drawn to the Hyde Park Historical Society, to our membership chairman, Gerhardt Laves, 5553 Kenwood Ave., Chicago 60637. And why not give a membership to a friend?

Incidentally, we have used Gerhardt's address rather than that of our headquarters as this Newsletter's return address. Since the headquarters building is staffed only on weekends, there are bound to be delays on forwarded mail.

MAKE A NOTE on your calendar now: Our Annual Din ner meeting is set for January 17, 1981. Full details will be sent to you later.

WINNERS of the Third Annual Paul Cornell Awards will be announced at that dinner. Nominations are now open, and we hope you will make some. Anyone except a currently serv ing HPHS Board member is eligible. During 1980, he or she must have "significantly furthered knowledge, appreciation or preservation of Hyde Park's historical heritage". ["Hyde Park" is defined as the territory encompassed by the original village.]

Such knowledge, appreciation or preservation may have been fostered by authorship of books or articles; the writing and giving of lectures; the creation of exhibits or student pro jects; the restoration of exterior or interior public spaces of commercial, civic or residential buildings, or of buildings which have been sympathetically renovated and successfully adapted to new uses.

HPHS members are invited to submit short written state ments in support of their nominees. Send statements to our secretary, Mrs. Lloyd Fallers, 5840 Stony Island Ave., Chi cago 60637.

VOLUNTEERS ARE NEEDED to staff our headquarters on Saturdays, 10 a.m. to noon, and Sundays, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. If you can help, call Mrs. John Davey at Ml 3-5943.

HYDE PARK HISTORY NO. 1 was published in June. Its 84 pages contain articles about the effect of IC electrification on Hyde Park, the community wars against the Demon Rum, and background on the annexation vote of 1889. Included too is amusing material from original sources-for example, Chicago's 1926 parade and pageant of railway progress, at which a Hyde Parker was crowned "Miss Transportation". HYDE PARK HISTORY NO.2 is reviewed on the next page. Why not give both to ex-Hyde Parkers on your Christmas list?

Each booklet is $2.50 and may be ordered from Gary Husted, 4900 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago 60615. Make your check payable to the Hyde Park Historical Society. Or pick up the booklets at our headquarters on a Saturday or Sunday.

EXHIBIT TRACES HYDE PARK'S POLITICAL ROOTS

By Lee H. Morgan

Hyde Park's early residents, detesting and fearing the cor ruption characteristic of urban government in the mid-1860's, persisted in maintaining a political structure featuring a town meeting, elected trustees, and part-time officials. As the village grew, the work-load became too great and the system broke down.

Even splitting the village into three districts didn't help.

The result? By 1885, as Andrew Yox says, Hyde Park had be come "an overgrown and ungovernable village" which "drifted into its only real political alternative-annexation to Chicago." Yox is the University of Chicago graduate student in his

tory who did the research for Hyde Park Politics, 1861-1919: Suburban Protection and Urban Progress. That's the title for both the current exhibit at HPHS headquarters and of the catalog for that exhibit. The latter is the second of the So ciety's 1980 publications under the series title of Hyde Park History.

From the Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1889-one of over 100 items in the HPHS exhibit, Hyde Park Politics: 1861-1919

Of Boodle and Bosses

Yox's article runs to 40 pages and may be more detailed than all readers would demand, yet it is consistently in teresting and informative. (Do you know what a "boodle fighter" was? The early definition of a "gangster"? Of a "boss"?) The appendix, listing Hyde Park Trustees and Al dermen from 1868 to 1919, makes one realize better than a statement of the bald fact that Hyde Park Village in the 19th century was a very large geographic entity.

(Instructions on how to order a copy of the booklet appear elsewhere in this Newsletter.)

Over 100 Items on Exhibit

The exhibit based on Yox's research· was prepared by a committee headed by Jean Block and·including Kathleen Conzen, Jean Gottlieb and Emma Kemp. It contains about 110 items, some under glass (various early documents col lected by the now-defunct Woodlawn Historical Society and normally stored at the Woodlawn Public Library) and others on burlap-covered panels which hang on the walls of our headquarters building.

The viewer progresses from pictures and mementoes docu menting the early suburban character of Hyde Park Center to the trauma of annexation to Chicago [see story at right]

to the ways in which leading citizens thereafter "brought their suburban concern for honest, efficient and economical govern ment into Chicago's political arena, in an effort to reform the city whose embrace they had been unable to evade."

Memorable Photos Included

Among the memorable photos is one of a young Paul Cornell with the painfully fixed gaze typical of mid-19th century Daguerreotypes; a Jackson Park lawn tennis scene, circa 1900; and an unusual picture of William Rainey Harper at his desk in Cobb Hall. Fascinating too is Charles Merriam's campaign literature addressed to Greeks, Italians and Germans, and to "the colored voter of Chicago."

For this opening exhibit, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners loaned us an old wooden ballot box. Hanging on the wall above it are ballots on which visitors may vote for or against annexation to Chicago. Although a good many ballots were cast on October 26, the polls will remain open for a few more weeks. Our next Newsletter will report the 1980 outcome of a question originally asked-and an swered-in 1889. The vote then, incidentally, was 5212 for annexation, 3357 against.

HYDE PARK TOWN HALL

... which has been the scene of so many noted contests and encounters between the taxeaters and the taxpayers. While nearly all the village officials have fallen in with the march

of progress and recognize the inevitable, there are a few who sulk in their tents and submit with sullen but hopeless pro test. In the acquisition of Hyde Park, Chicago gained a terri tory and people of which any city might well be proud.

The Town of Hyde Park was created and separated from the Town of Lake on March 3, 1861, and the Village of Hyde Park [39th St. to 138th St., State St. to the Lake] was or ganized under its last charter in August, 1872. Enthusiastic and patriotic Hyde-Parkers have for several years claimed that their village was the largest in the world, and the present popu lation of the annexed territory is computed at 75,000....

A TRIP THROUGH HYDE PARK

A trip to Hyde Park is full of interest and novelty to the visitor, who may go by the Cottage Grove avenue cable cars, the swifter moving steam cars, or charter a yacht or small steamer and take a sail along the attractive lake shore and disembark at the old pier at the foot of Fifty-third street, populous always with fishermen and youth who tempt the shiny perch or white herring with a forest of rods and laby rinth of lines and hooks.

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Pioneers of Park Design

ECKHART AND JENSEN: A WEST SIDE STORY

By Malcolm Collier

dSHH

How many South Siders have visited Chicago's great West Side parks: Humboldt, Garfield and Douglas, which lie be tween Sacramento and Crawford Avenues? These parks are connected with the South Side (and with Lincoln Park) by a series of boulevards, some hardly deserving the name but none theless linking the North, West, and South parks in a way the early city fathers envisioned and in a way unique to Chicago.

The boulevards are not the only link between the South and West parks. Although originally surveyed, planned and developed in the 1870s by Chicago's famous architect-engi neer, William Le Baron Jenney, the parks were later renewed and somewhat redesigned by Bernard A. Eckhart and Jens Jensen, two men with ties to Hyde Park.

Hyde Park Ties

Eckhart, successful and respected business man and civic leader, funded the University of Chicago's mathematics building, Eckhart Hall. Jensen was a close friend of the Univer sity's professor of botany, Henry C. Cowles and, later, of George Fuller. Although Jensen's landscape work was mainly in the parks and on the North Shore, he did also plan East

End Park and the grounds of the original Chicago Beach Hotel.

Starting as a street sweeper, Jensen began to work for the West Parks in 1886. By 1890 he was superintendent of small but prominent Union Park. By 1894 he was superintendent of large and prominent Humboldt Park. In 1900 he was fired for daring to question the weight of coal delivered to the West Parks greenhouses, an action consistent with his character but a political mistake. He turned then to private practice and soon his reputation was firmly established by jobs under taken for prominent Chicagoans and the best architects of

the Chicago School. 4

In 1905, when Bernard Eckhart became president of the West Chicago Park Board, he found that the bookeeping, landscaping, and reputation of these parks were in such dis array that he managed to secure a $4,000,000 bond issue to set things right. He asked Jensen to take charge. The results were beautiful: the spirit and the intention are visible today despite current neglect and abuse of the park lands.

Jensen's Vision

The new park buildings, lighting fixtures and park fur niture were designed by the city's best architects. In Hum boldt Park, Jensen was able to carry out to the greatest extent his vision of the Midwest landscape in a park setting: a "Prairie" river with its natural flora, a "natural" garden with acres of native plants, masses of hawthorn and other native trees. Later, in 1918, he carried this vision even fur ther in Columbus Park, the one park which he planned from the beginning.

All these parks are well worth a visit. All could use our attention and support.

•

1/1;

by Jim Stronks, Iowa City, Iowa

llbraham Lincoln died April 15, 1865. When Mary Todd Lincoln had to vacate the White

House she came to Hyde Park.

She arrived in Chicago on May 24. With her on the exhausting 54-hour train trip from Washington came her sons Robert (22) and Tad (12), her dressmaker/confidante Elizabeth Keckley (born a slave), old friend Dr. Anson Henry, and two White House guards, ►8

o Thomas Cross and William Crook.

The Lincoln parry checked into the Tremont House on Lake Street at Dearborn. When Cross and

Crook went back to the White House Mary Todd Lincoln's percs and power

as First Lady were suddenly over.

Lake Street was populous and loud; Mary Todd Lincoln needed peace and quiet. Io her anguish as widow she felt she could not bear to return to her house on 8th

Street in Springfield and its associations. Yet the Tremont House was too expensive for more than a week's stay.

Someone evidently gave the Lincolns a good tip, because four days later she wrote to a friend that "Robert went out yesterday to a place

called 'Hyde Park,' a beautiful new Elizabeth Keckley

Hotel, rooms exquisitely clean & even

luxuriously fitted up, seven miles from the City-Cars passing every hour of the day "

An advertisement in the Tribune on May 19 tells us more:

HYDE PARK HOTEL

Kept by A.H. Dunton

This Hotel has been put in complete order, and is now open, and will be kept, in all respects, as a first-class Hotel.

Persons desirous of making arrangements for the summer months, will find this a very agreeable place. It has all the advantages of a Watering Place Hotel, with almost hourly communication with Chicago by rail, while the distance by the traveled road from the Court House is less than seven miles.

Mr. Dunton refers, by permission, to Gov. Gilmore of New Hampshire; Hon. T.F. Chandler, U.S. Navy Agent, Boston; Messrs.

W.R. Doggett, S.F. Farrington, and Hoo J.T.

Scammon, Chicago.

No doubt Paul Cornell, who had built the hotel, was pleased that the First Family had come to live in his village, and conceivably he had something to do with it. A Chicago lawyer and suburban developer (for whom Abraham Lincoln had done some legal work), Cornell owned 300 lake shore: acres which he had coolly advertised as "beautifully situated on high ground." In a deal which was all-important to Hyde Park, he gave

the Illinois Central Railroad sixty acres for its right of way, and in return the ICRR began a commuter service in July 1856 by running the "Hyde Park Special" out to a little frame depot on the east side of the 53rd Street grade crossing. Here, in the summer of 1865, Robert Lincoln would catch the 8:52 mornings for the 30- minute ride in to Water Street and the offices of Scammon, McCagg & Fuller, where he would be

reading law.

"This quiet retreat," as Mary Lincoln soon called the hotel, stood near the lake shore at 53rd Street, about where the Hampton House stands today, except that the shore was closer in at that time. (It is not to be confused with the later Hyde Park Hotel standing on the south side of 51st between Harper and Lake Park from 1887 co 1963.)

"It almost appears to me that I am on the Sea Shore,'' wrote Mary Lincoln from the hotel; "land cannot be discerned across the Lake, some seventy-five miles in breadth. My friends thought I would be more quiet here during the summer months than in the

City."

But in coming to Hyde Park she could not escape her sorrows. "Tell me, how can I live without my Husband any longer?" she cries in a letter at this time. "This is my first awakening thought each morning, & as I watch the waves of the turbulent lake under our windows I sometimes feel I should like to go under them."

At first she had the comfort of her friend Elizabeth Keckley beside her, but Lizzie had to return to Washington and her business of making dresses for wives of cabinet officers.

Soon Mary Lincoln was writing, "I still remain closeted in my rooms, take an occasional walk in the park & as usual see no one." It is not surprising that she adds later in the same letter, "I

cannot express how lonely we are."

Without TV or rental movies, what did Mary Lincoln-in tell igen t, nervous, excitable-do with herself through her long weeks shut up in

the Hyde Park Hotel? The answer is, she'. read the newsparcrs aqd wrote letter<;.

A political wife, she devoL1,ed the gossip frorr. Capitol Hill in the half dozen New York and Chicago papers she regularly

saw. By early June their front pages were black with "The

Conspiracy Trial," and judging Robert Todd Lincoln

s,,r,119 1998

from the Chicago Tribune were full of lurid details about the conspirators' planning of her husband's murder-yet she mentions none of this in writing to friends.

For four years Mary Lincoln had been veritably catnip to the gossip columnists, but Chicago papers seem to have ignored her during the summer of 1865, perhaps because she had buried herself out in Hyde Park. There was one unhappy exception on June 14 when she read a spiteful paragraph in the Chicago Journal which said she had

threatened to whip little Tad for damaging his boots. It was untrue-and one more thing to resent in a letter to a friend the next day.

Her letters were many and long. They must have made fat envelopes. When they are printed in a book today, something she never expected, and God forgive us for reading her private mail, some letters fill two pages, and obviously account for hours daily at her desk. They are written, and well written, on black-bordered paper abouc the size of a postcard, showing excellent vocabulary and spelling, with tight, nervous punctuation (which is being edited here for the sake of clearness).

Mary Lincoln may have over-praised the Hyde Park Hotel to her correspondents. Lizzie Keckley claimed later that the Lincolns' rooms were "not first-class" but "small and plainly furnished," with meals sent up from the kitchen. It was far from the Executive Mansion. "I assure you," snaps the First Lady as

early as June 27, "I am growing very weary of boarding. It is very unbecoming when it is remembered from whence we have just come."

She never once complains of summer heat. Hyde Park, at the lakeshore, can be degrees cooler than central Chicago-important in 1865, before electric fans. Already the village, numbering some 500 population, had become a summer escape for affluent Chicagoans. On July 11 Mary Lincoln writes, apparently with approval, that the hotel "has become crowded with some of the very best Chicago people,

each family keeping their carriages; & I have, as you may suppose, indulged in my privilege of being very quiet & retired." Virtually a recluse, she did sometimes walk in "the beautiful park adjoining the place" referring to that space now lying between Harold's Playlot and the boulder inscribed to Paul Cornell. She added that "persons drive out [from Chicago} every day to see me; I receive but very few; I am too miserable to pass through such an ordeal as yet. Day by day I miss my beloved husband more & more "

Two weeks later, another

mood: "This place has become a complete Babel & I grieve that necessity requires us to live in this way...." No doubt she shunned the hotel's social event of the season on August 11 when, said the Tribune the next day, "the musical elite of Chicago took turns performing."

It was fortunate for this Victorian widow of forty seven in deep mourning that she had a grown son at her side. Robert Todd Lincoln had split no rails but instead attended Phillips Exeter, was a Harvard graduate, had been four months at Harvard Law, and briefly, for a few weeks near the end of the war, a captain on Ulysses S. Grant's staff. With the change in his family's fortunes, and in view of his

j unstable mother's need of zt him, he would have to forego i- a Harvard LLD. He was the J man in the house now, and

since it was the impatient,

! high-tempered Mary Todd

&. Lincoln's house it was certain

{ to be difficult.

i= "Robert is so worried chat I am sick so much that he has purchased a neat covered buggy," she writes on July 17. Perhaps Robert took her for soothing rides to see the fine homes in the village, or for a view of the mysterious white rollers off 49th Street. He would have sold his horse as an economy move, she writes, but "as it was his father's last gift, I would not consent to this, although I expect we shall hear remarks about our purchasing a buggy"-a reference to her (justified) reputation in eastern newspapers for mad extravagance.

On July 26 she writes of her other son, Tad, until ►Ct

S1,rlng 1998

-c:t) recently the irrepressible imp of the White House. "Taddie has made many warm friends," but because there is Scarlet Fever in the hotel she has sent him to live with friends in the country. Not Scarlet Fever bur TB would kill Tad only six years later, making him the third boy Mary Lincoln had lost.

By late summer 1865 the Hyde Park Hotel was no longer where the Lincolns wanted to be. Indeed Robert was said to have grumbled to Lizzie Keckley as early as his first week there that "I

would almost as soon be dead as be compelled to remain three months in this dreary house." They actually stayed only 2 1/2 months.

In mid-August Mary Lincoln moved into the Clifton House at Wabash and Madison. The Palmer House it was not, but she felt poor. It had in fact become an obsession with her. At his death Abraham Lincoln left some

$80,000 in cash and U.S. bonds, mainly salary from four years as President, but it was not in the widow's hands. Lawyer Lincoln had died without leaving a will, and his estate was

being administered by his old Illinois friend Judge David Davis, against whom Mary Lincoln fumed because of his firm control of the money. Mary,

Robert, and Tad were living on theinterest, split equally among the three of them, and the widow was living on

$1500 to $1800 annually at this time.

On August 17 she wrote angrily about a sense of injury which her letters show had become another mania. "I explain

Tad Lincoln (5 days before his father was shot) to you, exactly &

truly, how we are

circumstanced. A greater portion of our means is unavailable, consisting of a house in S. [Springfield] & some wild lands in Iowa. Notwithstanding my great & good husband's life was sacrificed for his country, we are left to struggle in a manner. .. of life undeserved. Roving Generals have elegant mansions showered upon them, and the American people leave the family of the Martyred President to struggle as best they may! Strange justice this." She refers to U.S. Grant, war hero, who was presented with homes in Galena, Philadelphia, and Washington.

So ended Mary Lincoln's sad summer on East 53rd

Street in Hyde Park. A year later she would settle into a home of her own in Chicago, a row house on West Washington, between Ann and Elizabeth streets, no longer standing. Erratic, she did not stay there long. Scheming ceaselessly to raise cash to pay off $20,000 in shopping debts which she had concealed from her husband, who had been busy with the Civil War,

she would later sell some of her Washington Street furniture to the Hyde Park Hotel for

$2094.50. Mind the fifty cents. The furniture probably burned up with the hotel in the late 1870s.

Mary Todd Lincoln, dressed always in high-fashion black, lived seventeen unhappy, troubled years as a widow. A pathetic ruin by 1882, when she was 64, she died in Springfield in the home of her sister, who had urged her not to marry Abraham Lincoln in the first place.

Tad Lincoln in 1866

On the cover: The Hyde Park Hotel, standing on the south side of 51st between Harper and Lake Pork from 1887 to 1963.

Tad Lincoln in 1864

Spriny 1998

Hyde Park Hotels: The Early Years, 1880-1915

A New Exhibit

at HPHS Headquarters

On display are 27 large format views of hotels that were once landmark institutions in the communities of Hyde Park, Kenwood and Woodlawn. Many were built for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Some became elegant centers of social and cultural life in their communities and resort destinations for visitors to Chicago from all over the world. Featured are such hotels as the first Chicago Beach Hotel, the early Del Prado and the original Windermere.

The sources of the views used in this exhibit are photographic and printed postcards, most of which were composed and published from the years around 1907 until about 1915. The photographer most represented by these images is Charles R. Childs, one of the more prolific and able photographers and postcard publishers of his day in the Chicago area. They have been enlarged for easier viewing through the use of a laser print copier.

Stephen Treffman, HPHS Archivist, prepared this exhibit, and will present a program on Early Hyde Park Hotels on Sunday, June 21, at 2pm. Do plan to come and get acquainted with early Hyde Park...

As Mary Lincoln read the Chicago Tribune in the Hyde Park Hotel in the summer of 1865, her eyes could not have escaped front-page advertisements exploiting her husband's murder. There was an ad for the "New and Beautiful Music" of "Abraham Lincoln's Funeral March." Also a "Beautiful Lithograph," one yard square, of "The Dying President" surrounded by his cabinet (one dollar). She would also see that, despite the nation's woe, the Italian Opera opened in Crosby's Opera House on June 5 with "Faust," followed on the 6th with "Norma." And there was grave news about the national debt. After four years of war it had risen to $2.6 billion. -J.S.

s,,r1ny 1998

From the Archives

by Stephen Treffman, HPHS Archivist

Paul Robeson (1898-1976)

The 100th anniversary of the April 9, 1898 birth of the famous African-American singer, actor, and activist is being celebrated throughout the year at hundreds of sites in Chicago and other cities around the world. From 1945 until 1958 Robeson often appeared on stages in or near Hyde Park. Five of his concerts were presented at the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall, 57th Street and University. Four were under the auspices of various student groups arid a fifth was sponsored by Earl B. Dickerson (1891-1986) who was an African-American alumnus of the University's Law School (1920), Supreme Life Insurance Company executive and a civil rights lawyer who played an historically significant role in overturning the legal basis for racially restrictive covenants.

On September 1, 1940, at the Chicago Coliseum, ! Robeson sang for the American Negro Exposition, : major organizers for which had been Dickerson and his ! wife, Kathryn. Robeson also performed at several i

concerts in Washington Park at 53rd Street near Marrin i

Luther King Jr. Memorial Drive and in such settings as •

the Corpus Christi Auditorium at 4600 S. King Drive, the Rose Ballroom at 4724 South Cottage Grove Avenue, Du Sable High School at 4934 S. Wabash

When Robert Lincoln rode the ICRR from Hyde Park to downtown Chicago daily in the summer of 1865 he could look out the window at 33rd Street and see Camp Douglas, the Civil War prison where 4500 Confederate soldiers had

died in the last 31/2 years. (See Hyde Park

History, March 1994.) Six months after Appomattox, 6000 POWs were still there. On May 9 the Tribune claimed that "They have nearly all signified their wish to take the oath of allegiance, and it is expected that all but about

Avenue, and the Pershing Hotel at 64th and Cottage Grove Avenue.

When in Chicago, Robeson was a guest of the Dickersons, at their home, 5027 S. Drexel Boulevard. At his death, Dickerson lived at 4800 S. Chicago Beach Drive.

Hyde Parkers listed as honorary members of the Paul Robeson 100th Birthday Committee include, Timuel Black, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, Leon Despres, Ishmael Flory, Harold Rogers, and Dr. Quentin Young, M.D. Anyone with any knowledge about Robeson's Hyde Park connections is invited to call our society or the Paul Robeson committee at 312-344-7114 or its internet home page(http://www.pobox.com/-robeson/).

SELECTED SOURCES

Robert Blakely, Earl B. Dickerson, unpub. Manuscript, (1988); Donald R. Hoke, Joe Powers and Mark Rogovin, Poul Robeson's Chicago History, 1921-1958 (Chicago: Columbia College, 1998)

Ct"■tnl ltt1paS ............ j 7.47 9.20 .l.46 6.16 7.361

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200will be allowed to do so and be discharged." On May 17th the Trib's Camp Douglas reporter, who had been often wrong but never in doubt, added that "Quietly but surely the inculcation of right and patriotic principles is going on among the prisoners of war confined in our /word illegible/ camp. Out of the whole six thousand rebels in the prisoners' square, there are not half a dozen who have not given up every rebel hope and are ready to abandon

treason and come out." -J.S.

s,,r,n[J 1998

The Hoo-den pavilion, located on Jackson Park's Wooded Island, ca. 1936. Courtesy, the Chicago Park District.

coming up...

Frank Lloyd and Japan: A Chicago Celebration

Frank Lloyd Wright's first encounter with Japanese architecture was the Ho-o-den temple which was installed on Jackson Park's Wooded Island for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. This contributed to Wright's life-long fascination with Japanese art and architecture, one of the few influences he ever acknowledged. Although the Ho-o-den no longer exists, its surrounding garden has been renovated by the Park District and Chicago officials have renamed the area Osaka garden in honor of our Sister City.

In recognition of the 100th anniversary of Wright's Oak Park studio and the 25th anniversary of the Osaka Sister Cities program, there will be a special weekend celebration, July 18 and 19, at Wright's Robie House and Osaka Garden.

On Saturday, a family oriented street fair will be held on 58th Street at Woodlawn Avenue in front of the Robie House, and will feature Japanese performing arts, crafts and cuisine. Sunday lectures

and films will focus on topics such as the 1893 World's Fair, Wright in Japan and Japanese gardens. Tours of the Robie House and Osaka Garden will be offered in Japanese and English on both days. Transportation between the two sites will be provided. "An Enchanted Evening in Osaka Garden" will be a highlight of the festival. There will be tours of the garden, and Tatsu Aoki, founder of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, will perform jazz music based on Japanese compositions with his trio. A Japanese dinner, a Bento, prepared by Totoya will be served, followed by a traditional Japanese Tea Ceremony in the pavilion presented by the Chicago chapter of the Urasanke Tea School. Reservations for this evening

event are limited.

Foundation volunteer Robert W. Karr, Jr. chairs this event which is co-sponsored by the Chicago Park District and others including Friends of the Parks, the University of Chicago and the Osaka Sister City Program. Watch for more information.

Sprln!I 1998

Lt909 11'ol?lD!l-l:)

;mudAV )JrBd d)[lll ·s 6Z:

A.ldqos flD!JOlS!H ){l'Ed dPAH

aul Cornell

from

Chicago & It's Makers

by Paul Gilbert & Charles Lee Bryson Felix Mendelson, Publisher, Chicago, 1929

uccessful lawyer, founder of Hyde Park and Grand Crossing, Paul Cornell has left through his untiring efforts a beautiful system of parks

to be the playgrounds of the millions who succeeded him as residents of Chicago. What greater tribute can be paid to one of Chicago's pioneers than to say through his efforts we have Washington and Jackson Parks with the system of boulevards and smaller parks that makes the southern portion of the city entitled to membership in the City Beautiful.

Pioneer blood of the earliest in America flowed in the veins of Paul Cornell. Born in White Creek, Washington County, New York, August 5, 1822, his family traced back through the father to Thomas

Cornell who left Essex in 1638 ro settle in Boston. His mother was a descendent of Samuel Robinson, founder of Bennington, Vermont.

Paul's father died during his infancy, and the mother (Elizabeth Hopkins} became the wife of Dr. Jonathan Berry and moved with her son to Adams County, Illinois. Here Paul worked on a farm and attended the public schools in winter. Soon he was able to teach and in 1843 began the study of law, which he continued in an office at Rushville, Illinois and at Joliet. Finally, he was admitted to the bar, and on June 1, 1847, set out for Chicago on a Frink and Walker stage coach.

Carrying his earthly possessions, consisting of an extra suit of clothes, a package of business cards and one and a half dollars, he entered the Lake House at Lake and Clark Streets and applied for lodging. While he registered someone helped himself co the bundle and young Cornell was left without resources.

John M. Wilson, an attorney with whom he had studied, however, came to his rescue and he secured his first employment with Wilson & Freer. A very successful career for a young man at law followed, but Cornell saw greater opportunities in real estate. lo 1852 he had hired John Boyd co make a topographical study of the district now known as Hyde Park and the following year he bought 300 acres along the lake front. Sixty acres of this he sold to the Illinois ►@

Paul Cornell Residence on Harper Ave. near 51 st St.

«@ Central Railroad on condition that they would maintain service of at least one train daily from Chicago and return. He was forced co agree to pay the difference between the cost of operation and the sale of tickets, a sum amounting at one time co $70 for three months. A receipted bill for chat amount is preserved in the Hyde Park Hotel, signed by George B. McClellan of the railroad, who lacer became general-in-chief of che United Scates Army.

Bue Cornell opened a subdivision, and the town, after a few hesitant months, flourished. He built the old Hyde Park Hotel, and when it burned, planned for che present structure, which belongs to his estate.

In the meantime a railroad accident on the south side had led co the general order that all trains crossing an intersection of two lines must come to a full stop. Cornell saw the possibilities in the order and bought land at the intersection of the two roads, subdividing it as Cornell, Illinois, but later changing the name to Grand Crossing.

Possessed of a clear vision Mr. Cornell was one of the original agitators for the South Park System of great playgrounds for the multitudes to come, and of boulevards. The winter of 1867 and 1868 he spent in Springfield fighting against hearty opposition for the South Parks bill. He won and was made one of the first commissioners, serving for fourteen years. He was an organizer of the Chicago Coal and Dock Company, which worked the Calumet.

Mr. Cornell married Helen M. Gray of Bowdoinham,

Maine, July 24, 1856, at che home of her brother in-law, Orrington Lune, of Chicago. They had five sons and two daughters, Elizabeth, Walter G. and Orrington, George Kimbark Cornell, John Evans Cornell, Paul and Helen. Mr. Cornell died March 3, 1904.

Summer/J:"all 1 9 9 8

Notes From the Archives

by Stephen Treffman, HPHS Archivist

The focus on Paul Cornell (1822-1904) in chis issue of Hyde Park History arises out of Len Despres' presentation co the 1998 annual meeting of our Society and the visit last May by Cornell's grandson, Paul Adrian Cornell, to Hyde Park and his enlightening offering at our program ac Robie House. In this issue's "Notes," we look more closely at aspects of Paul Cornell's life and business career in Hyde Park and Grand Crossing and at responses we received co our Harold Washington memorial issue.

Cornell in Hyde Park

When Paul Cornell came co Chicago in 1847 he lived in the central city. After becoming involved in developing Hyde Park and marrying Helen Gray (b. 1833) in 1856, he and his new wife took up residence in his new community, probably in 1857. Cornell constructed a house for his family on the southwest corner of Laurel (51st Street/East Hyde Park Boulevard) and Jefferson (now Harper) Avenue. The two story frame house, designed in the then popular Italianate architectural style, was essentially rectangular in shape. le was oriented from east co west along 5 lsc Street on a lot that was 50 feet on its east and west edges and 150 feet on its north and south boundaries. In the accompanying illustration, the house's main entryway appears in the forefront, which would indicate that the photograph was taken from Jefferson (Harper) Avenue rather than from 51st Street. The address ultimately became 5104 S. Harper Avenue. The cupola on the roof probably served to draw light into the center of the house. From the porch, Cornell and his family could see the smoke and flames from the Great Chicago Fire of October 9, 1871 that, in the process, also destroyed his downtown office and its records.

The presence of this imposing house so close co the Illinois Central railroad lines meant that early travelers and potential investors in Hyde Park property could easily see it when arriving at or passing Hyde Park by rail. In a sense, it served as Hyde Park's first "model home," an explicit vision of what could be established on this open and essentially empty land that was close enough to downtown Chicago via a short train ride but distant enough to be removed from its congestion. According to city directories and grandson Paul A. Cornell, Paul and Helen continued co live in the house until their deaths, in 1904 and 1914 respectively. It was demolished soon after her death. Commercial structures, once including a branch of one of America's early fast food chains, "House of Wimpy's: The Home of the Glorified Hamburger," now occupy the site. The land remains the property of the Cornell family, making

it the oldest parcel of Hyde Park real estate owned continuously to this day by one family.

Cornell built Hyde Park House at a cost of $70,000 around the same time that he constructed his house and may even have been resident in the hotel while the house was being built. When the hotel opened in 1858, it had a capacity for 200 guests and was, as Jim Stronks pointed out in our last issue, an attractive retreat for well-to-do Chicagoans. Because of additions to the Lake Michigan shoreline in lacer years, some confusion has crept into identifying the hotel's original site. A map from 1868 indicates that it stood at the southeast corner of 53rd Street and what is now South Hyde Park Boulevard, where the Del Prado Apartments now stands. The building stretched lengthwise north and south along the lake shore. Its front facade, the long side in the view in the accompanying illustration, faced west toward a landscaped driveway. According to Andreas, Cornell leased the inn co managers in 1858

and then sold it co J. Irving Pearce and Schuyler S.

Benjamin in 1865. Although the new owners enclosed che hotel's wooden frame in brick, the entire building was consumed by fire in 1877 at an estimated loss of some $310,000, most of it uninsured. These owners, it would seem, bore that loss, not Cornell. lncidently, another hotel called "The Hyde Park" existed in the 1870s at the southeast corner of 63rd and Stony Island Avenue in Woodlawn but whether Cornell had a financial interest in it is not known. After Cornell built his new hotel in Hyde Park, the Hyde Park Hotel on 63rd Street ceased co operate under that name.

Paul Cornell and Grand Crossing

By 1870, Paul Cornell and his wife had had five children, two of whom, ac ages four and six, had died of diphtheria early in that year. He was 47 years of age, a well-established lawyer and a South Park Commissioner which, no doubt with some pride, he reported as his occupation in the 1870 U.S. Census. Financially, the 1860s had been quite a boon for Cornell. He cold the 1870 census enumerator that he owned $600,000 in real estate and $6000 in personal property, a combined figure twelve times the amount he had claimed in the 1860 Census. A significant portion of his real estate holdings consisted of hundreds of acres of land chat he had acquired in 1854 and developed around a railroad intersection at 75th street and what is now South Chicago Avenue. In 1853 two trains had collided at this rail crossing with a loss of forty lives and many more injured. This led to legal requirements that, by the mid-1870s, had 210 trains of six different rail companies stopping ac this junction every day. This land became the basis for a new community originally called Cornell, but ultimately named Grand Crossing.

According to the original plat entered with the Cook County's Recorder of Deeds in 187 2, the borders ►0

Summcr/f.all I 9 !) 8

-<@ of Grand Crossing ran essentially from 71st Street on the north to 83rd Street on the south and from Stony Island on the east to Cottage Grove on the west.

The strategy that Cornell used in developing Grand Crossing was roughly similar to the one he used in the town of Hyde Park but with a wrinkle that notably differentiated it from his earlier effort. The center of the new town was arranged around a railroad stop and depot. He built a hotel (the Grand Crossing at 76th and Woodlawn) near the depot, established a small community park (at 76th and Greenwood) and donated land for a church (at 76th and Ingleside) and for a public school (at 76th and Drexel and named for Cornell), all of which was, essentially, a basic review of what he done before in Hyde Park Center. The twist on the model was that, immediately south of the park, Cornell constructed a large watch factory in 1870 that would serve not only as an anchor for Grand Crossing and, perhaps, a rewarding financial investment but also as a defining symbol of the community's character.

Cornell envisioned Grand Crossing as a center for

manufacturing supported by unusually good rail access for shipping and travel and the availability of good housing. Cornell offered manufacturers land at very attractive prices in the expectation that the workers drawn to these factories would then purchase housing on land which Cornell could also provide. The watch factory might help prime the pump, so to speak. In the case of Hyde Park, the direct parallel to the factory, in theory, was Cornell's donation of land for a Presbyterian Theological Seminary south of East End Park, but it was never built. In practice, it would be his house and his hotel that served to identify the town of Hyde Park in its early days as a middle- and upper-class residential suburban community linked closely to Chicago. Grand Crossing, however, was intended to be a far more self contained and self-sustaining economic entity.

The Cornell Watch Factory stood on the south side of 76th Street between Greenwood and Dobson, at what would now be about 1035-53 East. The gray structure, oriented east to west and facing north, was three stories high and perhaps half a city block long. An early example of the so-called American system of mass production, the plant had fifteen separate operating departments and employed perhaps as many as three hundred men using sixty-five different machines, some driven by steam, that Cornell had purchased from a defunct New Jersey watchmaking company or had constructed expressly for his factory. For its time, the building was probably as modern a manufacturing plant as could be found anywhere in the Chicago area. Natural light came through the building's unusually large windows and the landscaped area in front of the building provided a parklike setting. The company prided itself on its policy of employing only men. Women and children, whose labor might have

suggested a lower quality product or otherwise possibly been deemed exploited, were expressly excluded from employment.

A singular snapshot of Hyde Park history was captured when the company differentiated among the nine models it offered by identifying them by the names of real people, all of whom, but one, had historic connections to Hyde Park and Cornell. The top of the line model was the Paul Cornell, a nineteen jewel stem winder. More modest models, those with fewer jewels, were identified by the names of friends and business associates, some or all of whom may also have served as directors of the company: C. T Bowen, Chauncey M. Cady, Homer N. Hibbard, George F. Root,John Evans,]. C. Adams, E.S. Williams, and George W. Waite.

Bowen, Cady, Hibbard, and Waite were active early

collaborators with Cornell in the development of Hyde Park. Chauncey T. Bowen is linked to a subdivision in Hyde Park Center that included much of what is now Nichol's Park. He played a major role in lobbying for

Summer/f.,.11 I 9 9 8

passage of the South Parks legislation and was, with Cornell, a commissioner on its first board. He was president of the first Calumet and Chicago Dock and Canal Company, in which Cornell was also an investor. The company developed significant portions of the southern part of Hyde Park Village. Chauncey M. Cady (1824-1889) was the vice-president of the Cornell Watch Company. In partnership with George Frederick Root (1820-1895 ), Cady also owned Chicago's largest music publishing firm (founded 1858), with offices at the famed Crosby Opera House. Cady was president of the first Hyde Park Board of Trustees from 1868 until 1874.

Homer Nash Hibbard (1824-1897), Cornell's law partner in the 1860s, led the move to incorporate Hyde Park Village in 1861 and was associated with Cornell in founding its first public school. The present Kenwood Avenue from 51st to 55t·h Street was originally called Hibbard Street or Court. Hibbard also held investment property in Grand Crossing.

George Washington Waite (b.1819) was employed as chief engineer for several railroads and was linked closely to Hyde Park's village government. At various times he held positions as Hyde Park trustee, revenue collector, town clerk, and supervisor. He was Hyde Park's first postmaster and, in 1872, the first Chief Engineer for the South Park Board of Commissioners.

Dr. John Evans (] 814-1897), an obstetrician and

active real estate investor, was related to Cornell by marriage. He was associated with Cornell in creating Oak Woods Cemecary in 1853. He lent his name to the town of Evanston, Illinois and was founding president of Northwestern University's Board of Trustees. Cornell named one of his sons after Evans. By 1870, however, Evans was resident in Colorado.

Erastus S. Williams was a lawyer, circuit court judge and, as was Hibbard, an elder in the First Presbyterian Church of Hyde Park of which Cornell was a founding member.

The one model "name" chat does not fie naturally into this group is that of J.C. Adams and his is an interesting story. According to the 1870 Census, John

C. Adams, who then lived in Chicago with his wife and three children, was born in New Yock Stace in 183 5 and had been apprenticed as a watchmaker and jeweler. The first machine manufactured (interchangeable part) watches in the United Stares were made in 1854 by the Waltham (Massachusetts) Watch Company. In 1864, Adams, fascinated by the potential of chis technology, with associates drawn from the Massachusetts company and monies invested by a group led by a former mayor of Chicago, founded the National Watch Company, in Elgin, Illinois. Cornell somehow became acquainted with Adams and decided to back him financially in establishing a new watch company in Grand Crossing with machinery purchased from a defunct watch company in ►<i,

Cornell Watch Factory at 76th and Greenwood Ave., 1871

Summ,... /r,,11 I !.I 9 8

«C, Newark. Adams left the Elgin company and joined the Cornell Watch Company as its general agent or manager. He likely was the Cornell company's central figure in working out the details of production, employment, and distribution and likely had a hand in aspects of the design of the factory itself. The still existing small park that Cornell established across from the plant, at 76th Street between Dobson and Greenwood Avenues, may well have been named after Adams and retains that name to this day.

Using the names of private individuals to differentiate between a company's watch models was not unusual among manufacturers of that period but most appear to have been of persons involved directly in the business. While it is not known whether the Cornell watch "names" were actual investors in the company, using those names illustrates Cornell's capacity to draw a core of close friends and relatives around him with whom he shared the risks and rewards of his major projects or

otherwise obtained their support

and approval, whether in Hyde Park, Grand Crossing, the South Parks or Calumet. Those connections, however, have led historians to conclude that those behind the campaign for establishing the South Parks system, that is, Cornell and his close associates, were influenced by the prospect of increasing the value of real estate near the parks as well as for providing "lungs for the City."

In 1871 the Cornell Watch Company was profusely praised by an editor of a

perhaps because of, the new technology, it was still a capital and labor intensive business and efficiencies in production may have been difficult to achieve. In 1871, the company's manager claimed, perhaps overstating reality, that the firm had invested $500,000 building and equipping the factory and planned to devote another $500,000 for further development. Still, investment and labor costs had to have been substantial. As that trade journal editor had warned in 1871, despite a company's willingness to invest large sums to "secure perfection in the manufacture of their goods they may nor at all rimes receive the ample pecuniary return their enterprise deserves."

For Cornell to recover the costs of their manufacture and make a profit, a great many watches would have to be sold and that may have proved difficult to achieve in the face of stiff competition and a deteriorating economy. For example, in that same 1870 to 1874 period, Adams' old company in Elgin probably manufactured as many as four rimes the

number of watches Cornell produced

Ji!)

Offering nine different watch models, instead of just a few, while flattering to his friends and associates, may nonetheless also have raised Cornell's costs of production and further dampened his company's ability to compete. The Chicago Fire of 1871, in turn, played havoc with Chicago's economy, the closest large market for Cornell watches. Moreover, a sharp economic downturn in the United States

watch trade journal for making

Grandcrossing Hotel at Cornell

began in 187 3 causing wide

"the best watch the ingenuity of man has as yet produced" and for having a "liberal management". A glowing future was predicted. In 1874, however, Cornell suddenly sold controlling interest in the company to a California group headed by Leland Stanford, organizer of the Central Pacific Railroad and the man who hammered that famous spike at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. Most of the watch factory's machinery was shipped off to San Francisco along with sixty of its skilled workers who had elected to remain with the company.

The reasons for the sale of the Cornell Watch Company have never been fully explained. On its face, the Grand Crossing company seemed to be thriving; from 1870 to 1874 the company may have produced, by some estimates, perhaps as many as ten to twelve thousand watches. The problem was that despite, or

spread unemployment and wage cuts for many of those who were employed, particularly railroad workers, a prime market for watches. These factors also would have affected the ability of Cornell to raise funds to keep the company going in difficult times. Cornell's own investments were rather illiquid and his major interests, as well as those of most of his associates, were, after all, far more wedded to real estate than to watchmaking. For his friends Cady and Root, the Great Fire was a disaster. When the Crosby Opera House went up in flames, so did their business, throwing it into bankruptcy. Cady left Chicago in 1873. By 1874, then, in the face of factors internal and external to the company, it is likely that the Cornell Watch Company was experiencing difficulties in achieving profitability, actual or desired. Given these circumstances, Cornell probably welcomed the

Summer/J:,.11 I 9 9 8

opportunity to sell control of the company to other players.

The California group apparently believed that the company had a better chance for survival in a different market. Its strategy was to lower its labor costs at its San Francisco plant by hiring Chinese workers, then available in large numbers after completion of the transcontinental railroad line. The skilled workers who had come from Chicago, however, protested and went on strike. Conditions for the company continued to deteriorate and the company closed its doors 10 1876 and sold off its assets to watch companies in other cities.

Back in Grand Crossing, in 1875 Cornell sold his former watch factory building to the Wilson Sewing Machine Company, along with 300 lots of land. By then the community already had over seventy-five dwellings. In 1876, he put his Grand Ctossing Hotel up for sale. Although he continued to maintain

• significant holdings in Grand Crossing until the end of his life, Cornell, by the lace 1870s, had probably completed the most active phase of his involvement in development of that community. The factory itself became something of a community landmark, standing until at least the middle of this century. The site is now vacant. J.C. Adams moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he organized the Adams and Perry Watch Manufacturing Company only co see it go into receivership in 1876. In 1885, however, he returned to Illinois to organize and presumably make his fortune with the Illinois Watch Company in Springfield, Illinois which made watches there until 1932. The Elgin Watch Company, the one from which Adams left to join Cornell, became the largest manufacturer of watches in the United States and produced watches until the 1950s.

Grand Crossing's contribution to the history of Hyde Park Village lies in its role in encouraging the development of areas to its north and south. This led to an increase in the village's population with accompanying greater social and economic diversity which, in turn, gave rise to political forces competing over community resources, eventually challenging the old line powers in Hyde Park Center, including Cornell himself, in support of annexation to Chicago.

One of the earliest aspects of Grand Crossing's pre development was the establishment, in 1853, by Cornell and others, of Oak Woods Cemetary at 67th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, today one of the great historic cemetaries of Chicago. Cornell and most of his immediate family are buried there in lot 1-1. In 1888, Cornell installed there a dignified twenty foot tall monument cast by his own American White Bronze Company, then located only blocks from the cemetary at 73rd and Woodlawn in Grand Crossing. A relief of his face is set in place half way up the

monument, which is possibly the last surv1vrng structure whose construction was personally supervised by Cornell. It has held up very well and is accessible to the public.

The Hyde Park Hotel

When Cornell built his new Hyde Park Hotel on the south side of 51st Street between Lake Park and Harper Avenues (now site of the Village Center Shopping Mall), he did so in two stages. Although sources conflict on the matter, the east half, along Lake Park, was apparently built first, in 1887. The west half, along 51st Street/Hyde Park Boulevard to Harper Avenue, was added in 1890. This may account for early references to two different addresses for the hotel: 5122 Lake (Park) Avenue and 1511 E. Hyde Park Boulevard. An addition to the rear of the building was constructed at some date later than 1907. At the time it was built it was the largest residential structure in Hyde Park with ultimately 300 units of two to five rooms. Framed internally by a metal skeleron, it was proclaimed "fire proof' because of its then new fire restraining wall construction. On its first floor, an elegant marble lobby opened into a well-regarded dining room, various public meeting rooms and a smoking materials and newspaper stand. It also had a barber shop and pharmacy. An elevator took residents to their floors. A veranda that stretched along its north and west facade allowed visitors to relax and enjoy the street scene. Lake Michigan was then only a little more than a block away from the hotel and the large windows in each apartment not only brought in a good deal of natural light but allowed lake breezes to cool the rooms during the summer months. Over the years the well-regarded hotel was host co celebrities and many community social and cultural activities. The Old Settlers Club, something akin to a local historical society, met there regularly during the early years of this century.

Architecrual historian Carl Condit praises the hotel, designed by Theodore Starrett and built by the George

A. Fuller Company, as perhaps the earliest residential example of what has come to be called the Chicago School of Architecture. These innovative forms and structures first emerged in downtown Chicago during the early 1880s as spacious metal framed office and commercial buildings, many of them constructed by the same Fuller Company. Planning for such large buildings, argued its advocates, should be rational, empirical and systematic. The structures that emerged should project simplicity, stability, dignity, and efficiency. Artistry derived from functional elaborations, not from adding on useless embellishments. In other words, it fit important

emerging aspects of late 19th Century business philosophy-and Cornell-like a glove. ►ED

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Hyde Park Hotel, 51st St. between Lake Park and Harper Aves.

fj Condie ignores Cornell when he considers the hotel, preferring to focus on the architect's achievement, the building's influence on ocher hotels, and its divergence from older building traditions. Indeed, its design was decidedly not the reigning architecture of the Columbian World's Expostition although the hotel certainly housed a goodly number of visitors to the fair. The face remains, however, chat Cornell commissioned, approved and financed the planning and construction of chat very special and historically important hotel and his contribution deserves co be acknowledged. Hyde Park House, the watch factory, the lase Hyde Park Hotel, even the American White Bronze Company, seem all of a piece: among the largest and best built buildings of their type in their time and place, reflections of Cornell's commitment to quality and innovation. The Hyde Park Hotel not only belonged to Cornell, it epitomized his values, his career and the identity that he wanted for himself and the community he had founded. While ochers in Hyde Park may have built what were considered temporary scrucrures for the fair, Cornell constructed a hotel whose intended permanence was self-evident. In so doing, he introduced a form of alternative housing into the community-the first class residential hotel-chat would ultimately become very important to Hyde Park's development in succeeding decades. Cornell's funeral was held in the hotel on March 5, 1904. The building itself came down in 1963 during the community's urban renewal era.

Remembering Paul Cornell

Historian Donald Miller appraises Cornell's career and accomplishments sympathetically. "Cornell," he writes, "was more than a building speculator...(He) had a deep interest in the city's betterment and the hope... that parks and cultural institutions would act as restraints on Chicago's runaway materialism." The park system Cornell helped bring into existence "was Chicago's first effort to shape a development process dominated by unruly improvisation and to plan entire areas in advance of settlement for public, not private use. It was also the first successful effort in the city's history to break the monotonous spread of the grid." Mi Iler concludes, "Cornell's career as a town and park builder is an example of the combination of high and low motives, of risk caking in the interests of both personal and civic gain chat had been behind nearly every major municipal improvement since...(che early days of Chicago's history)." As he walked to his car after his visit co Robie House lase May, Paul A. Cornell offered his own down-to-earth assessment of his grandfather, "Given the curbulaoce of 19th century America, he had a lot of guts."

Cornell Avenue and Cornell Drive, of course, are named in honor of Paul Cornell. There is also a park named after him, Cornell Square, at 1809 W. 50th Street. In the main hall of its refectory, there is a painting of Cornell on the wall and a bust of him dated 1900, probably cast by American Bronze. An administrator there cold me the story that, years ago,

s u Ill Ill ,. ,. / r a I I I tl 9 8

young lifeguards, as a prank, would sometimes toss the bust into the park's swimming pool, co no apparent ill effect, however. le is now firmly bolted co a stand. The parkland at 47th Street and Cornell, has at times been referred co, unofficially, as Cornell Park, although it, coo, is pare of Burnham Park. There was once a public school named after Cornell at 7540 S. Drexel Avenue, on the land he originally donated for Grand Crossing's first public school. le has been corn down, probably during the 1970s, and the site is now vacant. The Chicago Historical Society has a number of photographs of Cornell, one of which we use on our Paul Cornell award certificates and another which we recently had enlarged for display at the annual meeting. le is co be installed permanently in our headquarters with a grant from friends of Betty Davey, one of the founders of the Hyde Park Historical Society.

Harold Washington Park?

A complaint was registered that I erred in the Winter 1997-98 issue of Hyde Park History when I extended the name of the playlot contructed in memory of Mayor Harold Washington to cover the entire East End Park. While the criticism is not without justification, there is more to this story than one might expect. Cornell established the park when he built Hyde Park House and landscaped it at a personal cost co him of $5,000. Simply called the Common, he gave it to the community, an act memorialized on a engraved boulder placed in the park in 1978. For many years, the park bore the name Ease End Park, reflecting both its location at the lake and the name of the main street bordering it: East End (earlier Park) Avenue, now South Hyde Park Boulevard. In 1927, however, according to the Chicago Park District Department of Research and Planning, with development of parkland along the lake, Ease End Park was formally absorbed into the far larger Burnham Park and ceased to exist officially under its historic name. Reference to it by its original name by the public continued, however, due to the thrust of community memory and tradition.

Today, there are only two official Chicago Park District signs displayed in the park. The first sign, at the entrance co the playloc, labels it "Harold's Loe" and the second, standing in the park itself, directly across from Hampton House, simply says "Harold Washington." The Park District views the playlot, established in 1992, as if it were a separate and distinct entity. As far as they are concerned, there are now two parks there, the larger of which is simply an undifferentiated pare of Burnham Park. This would explain why there is no signage for Ease End Park: ic no longer exists by that name.

Whatever the Park District's official intentions or older community traditions, the new name, Harold Washington Park, seems to be working itself into the public mind as denoting the entire park area from the playloc to South Hyde Park Boulevard. An employee of the Park District's regional office at the South Shore Cultural Center, for instance, where I had initially inquired, insisted to me chat "Harold Washington is the name of the whole park." The Herald in its March 4, 1998 schools issue and again on August 26, 1998 printed maps that also identified che park by chat name. In the absence of any other official marker, it is not difficult to understand why the public would come to believe chat the whole park had been renamed in honor of the lace mayor.

In face, such a change may occur officially. In my conversations with the Park District I learned that it was studying converting the names of its numerous playlocs into parks. Bixler Playloc, for example, may eventually be renamed Bixler Park. Their project also includes reviewing, for possible renaming, parks

with names that appear to duplicate one another. ►«i>

s II Ill Ill I' I' / r a I I I 9 9 8

@ The two parks about which I was requesting information turned out to be on one or the other of their lists. In the case of Adams Park, there is another one by that name on Chicago's north side. The District had no historical information in their current files on Grand Crossing's Adams Park but I could share our research, tracing it back at least to the 1872 plat, thus placing it among the older named parks in the over 500 parks currently in their system, and suggesting a possible source of the Adams name. "Harold Washington Park" may be designated as the official name for the area previously categorized as a playloc. Moreover, though raised tentively by a staff member working on this project, there is a possibility that the entire area including the playlot and the park land west to Hyde Park Boulevard, chat is, what once was officially labelled East End Park, might be renamed "The Harold Washington Memorial Park." While such decisions are made ultimately by the Park District Board, with recommendations from the park's cop level administrators, community impuc in chis process seemed genuinely welcomed. Persons wishing to convey their sentiments about these matters should direct them to Dr. Gwendolyn Larouch, Director of External Affairs, Chicago Park District, 425 E. Mcfetridge Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60605.

Incidently, although Harold Washington was che

only sitting mayor of Chicago to have made his home in Hyde Park, in the course of the research for chis

issue, I learned that Edward J. Kelly, while mayor in

the 1930s, lived at 4821 South Ellis Avenue in the Kenwood community.

In 1876, an "old settler," possibly Cornell himself, was asked "what will Chicago be twenty five years from now?" "Why sir, I am afraid to tell you, for fear you will laugh at me, as all my friends did, when I prophesied that in 1865, Chicago would have 100,000 inhabitants; in 1870, 150,000, and in 1886, 200,000; and

yet you see I did not set it half high enough...(By 1900), if manufacturers come in to help us, as I believe they will, I expect Chicago will be built up in that time as compact as she is now, down south to the Indiana State Iine."

From: D. H. Horne, Chicago As It Is To Be, 1876

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Another response to our Harold Washington memorial issue came from Charles and Yolanda Hall who have organized the "Chicago Friends of The Lincoln Brigade." They report that honorary Spanish citizenship was granted to surviving members of the Brigade in 1997. Six of chem were Chicagoans, of whom two, Dr. Aaron Hilkevitch, M.D. and Emanuel Hochberg, were Hyde Parkers. Mr. Hochberg died April 28, 1998. Their research, drawn primarily from che Brigade's archives at Brandeis University, indicates that more than a dozen students from the University of Chicago went to Spain, including Nathan Meyer Schilling who was killed in battle there. Schilling had lived at 5610 S. Dorchester. Charles Hall is also a Brigade veteran and he and his wife once lived in Hyde Park. Further information on che plans and activities of the new group may be obtained from the Halls at 5320 N. Sheridan Road, #1902, Chicago, IL 60640 or, by phone, at 773-769-2665.

Selected sources: A.T. Andreas, History of Cook Co11nty (Chicago, 1884); Jean Block, Hyde Park Homes (Chicago, 1978); Chicago Trib11ne, March 4, 1904; Paul Gilbert and C.L Bryson, Chicago and its Makers (Chicago, 1929); Carl W. Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commerical and Public Building i11 the Chict1;:,o Arect, 1875-1925 (Chicago, 1964); John Drury, "Grand Crossing," Landlord's G11ide (Chicago),

Vol. 38, no. 10 (Ocrober, 1947); Dena J. Epstein,

Mmic Publishing in Chicago before 1871: The Firm of Root and Cady. 1858-l 871 (Detroit, 1969); Everett Chamberlin, Chicaf!,O and its S11b11rbs (Chicago, l 874); Paul A. Cornell, Pa11I Cornell: The Father of Hyde Park (Chicago, 1978 and 1998); Donald R. Hoke, The Time Mme1m1 flistorical Cataloiue of American Pocket Watches (Rockford, Illinois, 1991); D.H. Horne, The City of Chicago That ls To Be.' The Village of Hyde Park and her Tou·ns.' Grand Crossing (Cleveland, Ohio, 1876); Hyde Park I-leralcl, August l l, 1938; Ann Durkin Keating, B11ilclinf!. Chicaf!.o (Columbus, Ohio, 1988); Paul Markum, "Village Problems and City Solutions," Hyde Park I-Iistot)' 1 (Chicago: Hyde Park Historical Society, 1980), pp. 5+82; Donald L. Mi Iler, City of the Cent11ry: The Epic of Chicaf!,O and the Making of America (New York, 1996); Cooksey Shugart, The Complete Guide to American Pocket Watches (Cleveland, Tennessee, 1981); The Watchmaker and jeweler, Vol. 2 (May, 1871) and Vol. 3 (September and November, 1871); A.N. Waterman, Historical Revieu1 of Chicago and Cook County (Chicago, 1908) Andrew Yox, "Hyde Park Politics: 1861-1919," Hyde Park History 2 (1980). Thanks to Bernard Edwards and Cooksey Shugart for leads regarding the Cornell Watch Company and to Julia Bachrach and Anita Salazar of the Chicago Park District.

S u 111 111 ,. r / f. a I I I 9 9 8

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L, A. H l

Adams Park, 1908

A 1908 post card view of Adams Park and the old Cornell Watch Company in Grand Crossing was a key to identifying the then location of the old watch factory at Ease 76th and Greenwood Avenue. At the time of chis photograph, the building was occupied by A.C. Clark and Company, a dental supply manufacturer. Although the building no longer exists, Adams Park, at least 116 years after it was established, still does, on the north side of 76th Street between Greenwood and Dobson Avenues diagonally across the street from the much larger Grand Crossing Park. Adams Park may have been named after Cornell Watch Company official John C. Adams.

By 1876 Hyde Park Village consisted of twenty-eight towns: Cleaversvi Ile, Forrestvi Ile, Kenwood, Hyde Park, South Park, Woodlawn, South Shore, Oakwood, Brookline, Englewood, Grand Crossing, South Chicago, Clark's-Point, Irondale, Stony Island, Indian-Ridge, Colehour, Chittenden, Burnside, Roseland, Kensington, Riverdale, Wildwood, Dalton, Kingston, Anthony, Binford, Egandale, and Fernwood.

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This Newsletter is published by the Hyde Park Historical Society, a not for-profit organization founded in 1975 ro record, preserve, and promote public interest in the history of Hyde Park. Ics headquarters,

Hyde Park Houses

JEAN F BLOCK

n Enduring Gift: Hyde Park Houses Twenty Years Later

Hyde Park-Kenwood; second, photographs by Samuel

W. Block Jr. of seventy-six houses as they appeared in 1978, accompanied by a contemporary map showing

By Stephen A. Treffman

wenty years have passed since The University of Chicago Press published the lace Jean Friedberg Block's groundbreaking Hyde Park Houses: An

Informal History, 1856-1910 in the Fall of 1978. It is as

well, the tenth anniversary of her death.This presents an opportunity to look back at the significance of this book and at Jean Block's life.

When introduced to the public, Hyde Park Houses was characterized by its publisher, on one hand, as a "detailed architectural history of Hyde Park's first fifty years" and, on the other, as "a charming and informative guide to the historical domestic architecture of one of Chicago's oldest

neighborhoods." Thar these are not guire the same things may have reflected some difficulty on the part of this world-class academic press about just how to characterize the book. In fact, it was the first book of its type ever published by the UC Press. The book consists of four distinct sections: first, a general history, with illustrations and maps, of the development and evolution of nineteenth century

their locations; third, in an appendix, biographical notes on more than forty architects along with listings of their Hyde Park buildings; and fourth, in a second appendix, a checklist of over nine hundred dwellings in Hyde Park and, where known, their architects and the names and occupations of their original owners organized by streets and street numbers. The book concludes with a bibliographic essay chat reflects the wide and unusual range of sources she used and remains instructive to this day.

The book, which had a printing of 10,000 copies, was well-received and found wide distribution.

Currently it may be found in at lease fifty-five academic, state, and municipal libraries in Illinois alone and may be found in many major libraries throughout the United States. Several years ago, the Hyde Park Historical Society gave copies of the book to public schools in the community and also maintains a copy in its headguarcer's library. The Blackstone Library catalog lists eight copies in its collection and The University of Chicago's Regenstein Library has copies at several locations.

As a guide to historic homes in Hyde Park and ►8

-<8 Kenwood, it was to many a revelation of the rich and accessible architectural history chat existed throughout the community. There simply had never been any publication on Hyde Park quire like it before. Familiar old houses now had names and daces attached to chem: they had their own histories. In addition, for the first time and for an audience beyond local boundaries, a general history of Hyde Park now existed that provided a narrative context not only co the houses but to the community in which they stood. It is chat which transformed Hyde Park Houses from what might otherwise have been viewed only as a guidebook into something more substantial and, as well, historic in its own right.

The publication of Hyde Park Houses in 1978 may be

viewed something of an unofficial proclamation of the end of the great period of urban renewal in Hyde Park. Beginning around 1950, local forces frorri religious institutions, The University of Chicago, community

• organizations and political activists drew together co hale the physical deterioration of the community's housing stock, revitalize its infrastructure and establish a more inclusive and constructive social situation. The long years of economic depression and war had stifled new construction in Hyde Park and a combination of housing shortages, social conflict, discrimination, and population changes appeared co threaten the viability of the entire community. The result, funded in part by federal grants, was the demolition, during the 1950s and 1960s, of large areas of residential and commercial property in Hyde Park and, perhaps co a somewhat lesser extent, in Kenwood.

Visitors to our exhibition of Vi Fogel Uretz' paintings and her slide presentations on urban renewal in Hyde Park at our headquarters in the 1995-96 season could only marvel at the images of sheer physical destruction that she recorded. It was almost as if the ravages of war in distant lands chat had been seen only in newsreels and magazines had somehow, incredibly, been visited upon Hyde Park. While the resulting new development was lauded nationally as a remarkable achievement in urban revitalization through federal and local partnership, the human impact was substantial.

Several hundred small businesses were affected. Many of

them simply closed while ochers scrambled to find new locations in Hyde Park or left the community. Some residents, by choice or by circumstance, found homes elsewhere in Chicago or fled the city entirely and moved co the suburbs.

For those Hyde Parkers who remained, though buoyed by hope, idealism and determination, as the small shops, grocery stores, restaurants, houses, hotels, apartment buildings, houses of worship, theaters, gas stations and garages, even the post office and the police station that had been so much a part of the landscape of their lives disappeared; they were left only with

memories of what had been. Whether or nor one favored the course and effects of urban renewal, the changes it wrought were, for many people, undeniably painful and, for some, accompanied by a sense of loss chat only mellowed over the years. It is no surprise chat Vi Urecz' talks in 1995 and 1996 were to standing room crowds.

What Jean's book did, in effect, was to celebrate chat portion of Hyde Park-Kenwood that had survived the tumult. That success could be attributed co the combined efforts of a range of community institutions, a mobilized citizenry, enlightened political leadership and investments of large amounts of time, effort and, especially, money, government and private, in the community. Although Jean alludes only briefly to these developments in the preface, an important aspect of the philosophy that propelled Hyde Park's urban renewal effort does make its way into the text. At one point, in describing the emergence of activist

community organizations at the turn of the century, she writes (page 70): "Protection, improvement, betterment-the words imply that the community was less than perfect, and yet they also carry with them the implication that its citizens believed in their own power co affect the physical and moral conditions of life." That underlying subtext, the connection between the long-past and the then-immediate past, spoke co anyone familiar with--or who had lived through Hyde Park history during the third quarter of this century.

Also reflected in the book was the emergence of new attitudes regarding the preservation of older buildings. During the most intense period of urban renewal, postwar modernism dominated new construction design and older buildings were either physically eliminated or cast almost into a fashion shadow. In time, however, the idea of respecting and rehabilitating older housing designs and forms became a compelling value in the minds of many residents and homebuyers. Older homes and apartment buildings, they decided, had an aura and meaning worth nurturing. While this development was not unique to Hyde Park-Kenwood, of course, Hyde Parkers were among chose who played pioneering roles in that process here in Chicago.

Recently, a letter from long-time Hyde Parker Richard Orlikoff appeared in our local newspaper, The Herald (December 9, 1998). In the letter, he claims that the oft-quoted comment about Hyde Park and urban renewal that entertainers Elaine May and Mike Nichols made famous, originally had been his: "Here we stand, black and white, shoulder to shoulder against the poor." Oversimplification or not, the line reminds us that there were winners and losers in the urban renewal process. It does not at all detract from the achievement that Hyde Park Houses represents to note that the houses chat appear within it belonged co many of the winners.

Houses and the HPHS

The idea of a local historical society was not new in Hyde Park but Jean's book played a role in helping to actually establish one. The Old Settler's Club existed for awhile in the early part of this century, apparently until the old settlers were no more. In 1939, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the annexation of Hyde Park to Chicago, Paul Cornell's niece, Alice Manning Dickey, an active participant in the event, publicly urged establishment of an historical society in the community. World War II and its concerns intervened, however, and the proposal did not progress. The vision was reborn, however, in the mid-1970s by resident Clyde Watkins who engaged Jean and Muriel Beadle in the project at its very earliest stages and then drew other prominent and committed residents into the planning and fundraising that led to t'he founding in 1977 of the Hyde Park Historical Society and its installation in our current headquarters on Lake Park Avenue.

Aside from Jean's personal involvement with the

HPHS, her book presented the tableau of a community whose history was worth remembering and, thus, bolstered the attempt to do so through an actual organization. Sensing the legitimacy and impetus the book would provide their organizing efforts, writers in early issues of the Society's newsletter expressed eager anticipation of the book's publication. After it appeared, the book quickly became the standard history of early Hyde Park and the starting point for anyone interested in studying the development of the community. The society stocked copies for sale to the public. Finally, and this cannot be overstated, the essential work that Jean Block did to produce her book made it possible for others not only to expand upon what she found but to

strike out into other areas of research.

If Hyde Park Houses hadn't been written, we might still be bogged down in trying to uncover and connect the materials and details Jean spent at least three years of her life determinedly cracking down. There are local historical societies and community groups elsewhere, both near and distant from Hyde Park, caught in precisely that situation today.

Beyond the local community, Hyde Park Houses found its place in very respectable company. In the book's introduction, the distinguished historian Kenneth T. Jackson placed it within "the new urban history," a still emerging body of literature chat examines local or neighborhood history as a way to understand or illuminate larger issues in the development of

America's cities. The book appeared at a time when "documenting the built environment" was a clarion call among preservatists. Jean was conducting research that almost directly responded to needs articulated in such prominent publications as, for instance, The National Trust for Historical Preservation's America's Forgotten Architecture (New York, 1976). Since then, Hyde Park Houses has earned its way into the footnotes and bibliographies of a wide range of books and articles published by writers not only on local history but, as well, on various aspects of architectural, Chicago, and general urban history. Indeed, its seeming awkwardness, that segmentation of its parts, has provided hooks for researchers coming at topics from varying angles and allowed them to use the book in different ways. This book which, Jackson noted, used "neither the methodology nor the jargon of the academic profession" (something that troubled some professors on the Press' editorial board), has, nonetheless, served that profession-and other intelligent readers-well.

Hyde Park-Kenwood is not an ancestor-worshipping community. When I began to look into its past, I found few letters, diaries, or books annotating or commemorating it. Its first public buildings-the town hall, the churches, the public school, the original Illinois Central stations-have long since disappeared. But we do have the houses. They are the material remains of the early culture of the first fifty years ... They are the tale and signature of the past, unwittingly bequeathed by their owners and builders. Jean Block, in her preface to Hyde Park Houses

W n•er 1998/1999

Who Was Jean Block?

Jean was identified in the book and accompanying promotional materials only as the president of Midway Editorial Research and a lifelong resident of Hyde Park. Samuel W. BlockJr., the book's contributing photographer, receives only an expression of gratitude for his photographs in Jean's preface, but no direct information about him appears anywhere in the text, on the flyleaf or on any of the promotional material. How much of this reflected Jean's choice or a university publisher's uncertainty about how to present a non academic author, an independent scholar, is difficult to assess. Looking back, however, one can only conclude that it was hardly adequate.

The inner workings of much of Hyde Park's history is women's history in the sense of the leadership, service and commitment women have given to o'ur local educational, charitable, religious, cultural, recreational, business and political history. A major problem in recalling women's history, however, is that so much of it has tended to be carried out quietly, unrecognized, unrecorded and neglected. One of Jean's important contributions in Hyde Park Houses is her documentation of some of the social and cultural activities that women organized and sustained in early Hyde Park-Kenwood history.

Jean Block's life, a life of service, was part of this local history and she was active in a variety of community organizations. She was a board member of The University of Chicago Laboratory School's Parents Association, serving a term as its president, and co edited its newsletter with Ruth Grodzin. She was one the voices in favor of greater democratization within the University Colony Club and actively supported the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, the Fortnightly Club and International House. She volunteered as a research associate at Regenstein Library. Already noted was her role in the founding of the Hyde Park Historical

Society and its early success. She served not only as one of our early presidents but also organized our archives and negotiated its home at Regenstein Library. She was also a member of K.A.M. Isaiah Israel Congregation.

Since Jean has been described as a more behind the scenes type of person, the full extent of her community involvement-her public life, aside from her publications-has been difficult to document and is here almost certainly incompletely reported. That is a problem not just in Jean's case but, as well, for many other women throughout this community's history who have found or created roles for themselves in the community beyond the family. In that process they have devoted much of their lives to giving texture to our community's history, articulating its moral and ethical issues, and making this neighborhood, through

all its years and its changes, a better and more vibrant place in which to live. Rendering that history remains a challenge.

It is instructive to examine Jean Block's life and

family history, not only because it provides some background about her but also because it has a rough similarity to the stories of other accomplished Hyde Park families. There is inspiration, too, because, as one soon learns, Jean was a very sturdy human being. Jean's grandfather on her father's side, Cass Friedberg (1848- 1924), came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from Kovnos, Lithuania in 1861 at the age of 13. He outfitted himself as a peddler and worked his way west to Kansas. He opened a successful dry goods store in El Dorado, Kansas in the 1880s, but closed it in 1900 to become president of a wholesale bedding company in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Jean Block, 1984

In 1875 Cass married Laura Abeles (1853-1882), born in Leavenworth, Kansas to Simon and Amalia Abeles. Cass and Laura Friedberg had three children, one of whom, ultimately Jean's father, was born in 1875 in Chicago and given the name Selig. Later, he would take the last name of Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War as his first name, Stanton.

Simon Abeles, Jean's great-grandfather on her mother's side, was born in Bohemia in 1817. His father had been a rabbi and his mother the daughter of one.

Simon, literate in both Hebrew and German, had started out as a teacher of Hebrew and the Talmud but in 1837 found employment as craftman of violin strings. He decided to start life anew in the United States, however, and immigrated to St. Louis in 1840. He ultimately settled in Leavenworth, Kansas and became a successful clothing merchant, founder of a bank and real estate investor. He died in 1890.

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Stanton Freidberg, Sr., Jean's father, grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas, where his family had returned after his birth, and attended its public schools. His higher education began with a year of study at the University of Michigan but, having decided to become a physician, he returned to Chicago in 1893 to attend Rush Medical School from which he graduated in 1897. He became an ear, nose and throat specialist of national reputation. He invented a number of specialized instruments, one of which facilitated the extraction of diaper pins from infant throats and was the first to remove tonsils and adenoids as a measure

to cure diphtheria bacillus carriers. He served and taught at several Chicago hospitals and medical schools including German Hospital, Rush Medical College, Anna W. Durand Hospital, Presbyterian Hospital (its first Jewish physician), and Cook County Hospital. He joined the staff of the latter in 1903, became attending otolaryngologist there by civil service examination in 1906, and was, from 1913 to 1919, chief surgeon in that hospital's department. The year 1906 also marked the date of his marriage to Aline Liebman (1886-1954), the daughter of Louis and Henrietta Liebman of Schreveport, Louisiana where her father was a prosperous merchant. They met while she was visiting relatives in Chicago.

Jean Friedberg--our Jean-was born in Chicago on June 12, 1912 to Stanton and Aline and was the second of three children. She had an older brother, Stanton A.,Jr. (1908-1997), who, as an adult, also became a prominent Chicago otolaryngologist, and a

Jean and Samuel Block and guest at their summer home near Mill Pond, Wisconsin

younger sister, Louise Friedberg Strouse (b. 1915 ), who now lives in California.

In 1912 the family resided at 4907 S. Washington Park Court, a short street a block from Grand Boulevard, now King Drive. Dr. Friedberg served as a medical officer during World War I but only eight months after returning to Chicago to resume his practice, he died in 1920, age 45, of a mastoid infection. Jean was eight years old.

During the 1920s, Aline Friedberg and her children lived at 5816 S. Blackstone. Adolf Kramer, Jean's uncle (he was married to Stanton Friedberg, Sr.'s sister Rachel) and founding partner of the real estate firm of Draper and Kramer, provided assistance to Aline and her three children. The children obtained their elementary and secondary education at the Laboratory Schools of The University of Chicago. Jean graduated from Vassar College in 1934, returned to Chicago and taught at the Francis Parker School until her marriage.

On November 7, 1940, Jean married Samuel Westheimer Block, born in St. Joseph, Missouri on February 14, 1911, the son of one of the owners of Block Brothers, a prosperous dry-goods store. Samuel had what could only be termed an elite education and prestigious career, then or now. He graduated from the Worcester (Massachusetts) Academy in 1929, obtained his A.B. from Yale University in 1933 and received

his LLB. from Harvard University's Law School in 1936. He came to Chicago, was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1936 and joined a law firm which evolved ultimately into Jenner and Block. During ►8

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'3World War II, he served as a member of the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of captain. After the war Jean and Samuel made their home at 5719 S. Blackstone.

He became a partner in his law firm in 1948. Throughout his career Samuel was active in pro bono work, particularly in the area of civil rights. In addition to sitting on several corporate boards, he was a board member and officer of the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, the Faulkner School, and the Community Music Program, sponsors of the Merit Music program. Samuel died suddenly in 1970 at the age of 59. Jean was 58.

In the almost two decades before Hyde Park Houses

appeared, Jean labored at honing her skills as writer. Her work on the Lab School parent's newsletter provided one such opportunity. She also enrolled in The University of Chicago and, in 1963; was awarded a master of arts degree in the Humanities. Jean was then 51. That same year Jean with Ruth Grodzins, Ruth Goetz and Elaine Halperin, formed Midwest Editorial Research. It provided university faculty, graduate students, business and civic leaders and organizations assistance in editing or developing printed materials and speeches. The partnership wound down when some of the partners moved out of town or took other jobs. Jean then turned her attention more directly to architectural research. Jean also took a course on writing while actually working on Hyde Park Houses. That the book, which was published when Jean was 66, is as gracefully written as it is was not an accident.

Samuel W. Block, Jr., the photographer for Hyde Park Houses, was the eldest of Jean and Samuel Block's three children. He was born May 2, 1943 in Dayton, Ohio, where his parents lived briefly. As did his younger sister, Elizabeth, and brother, Michael, he underwent his primary and secondary education at the Laboratory Schools of The University of Chicago. He received a B.A. from Knox College in 1964 and later completed a two year program in photography at Chicago's Columbia College. Described as brilliant even by persons not in the family, Sam was an early student of computer applications for business. During the 1970s he was employed by a large meat refrigeration warehouse company for which he wrote a complex and pioneering spreadsheet program that linked financial, storage and processing variables for management and audit purposes.

Photography, though, remained Samuel's first love. His camera of choice was a tripod-based large format 4 x 5" Burke and James (Chicago) View camera that required photographic plates (rather than roll film) and the use of a black cloth hood by the photographer. Although his seemingly straightforward photographs in Hyde Park Houses seem in tune with the "informal"

nature of the book (e.g., some include automobiles parked on the street), in fact, like the rest of Jean's book, the photographs were carefully planned. Samuel and Jean selected times of the year when foliage did not obscure views of the houses and natural lighting could be optimized to help strengthen the images.

During the 1970s, Samuel moved to the Near West side of Chicago where he had purchased a duplex for renovation. On June 11, 1982, as he was alighting from his automobile near his workplace on Pershing Road, he was struck by a passing car and suffered severe head injuries. He lay in a coma for weeks at The University of Chicago hospitals, his mother at his

Samuel W. Block, Jr.

bedside every day. On August 15, he died without ever recovering consciousness. He was 39 years old. The motorist who hit him and fled was never apprehended. Jean was then age 70.

Some of Samuel's Hyde Park House photographs have

appeared in other publications. Four of them may be found in Virginia and Lee McCalester's Field Guide to American Homes (New York, 1984) and another was used for the cover of a novel published in the early 1990s. The negatives for all the House photographs are in our archives at Regenstein Library. His port_raits of relatives and friends are treasured by their owners and a series of his photographs of old Wisconsin barns

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remain in demand. Two views of the family summer home in Wisconsin are still on display at the refrigeration company for which he had worked.

Again, as she had done after her husband's death, Jean found solace in work and produced three important publications, two of them a result of her involvement as a volunteer with Regenstein Library's Special Collections Department preparing catalogs for their exhibits. The first, was The Uses of Gothic: Planning and Building the Campus of the University of Chicago 1892-1932 (1983), a now classic work which is still in print, and Eva Watson Schutze: Chicago Photo Secessionist (1985). The third, an outgrowth of some of her research for Hyde Park Houses, was a chapter entitled "Myron Hunt in the Midwest" in Jay Belloli and others, Myron Hunt 1868-1952: The Search fora Regional Architecture, (Los Angeles, 1984). Jean was 72 when Uses of the Gothic appeared. In the ensuing years Jean focussed on establishing our archives at Regenstein and planning a follow-up to Houses on apartment buildings in Hyde Park that was still in its early stages of development before her death, on June 16, 1988. She was 76. Houses went out of print in 1993 but staff from The University of Chicago Press have told me that the press is considering reissuing it in paperback but not before the year 2000 and then only if they can figure out a financially feasible way to do it.

I regret that Jean and I became acquainted only in

the last year of her life. Despite her physical discomfort caused by illness, she graciously took the time to walk me through the mechanics of organizing the archives and she talked a bit about Hyde Park architecture. She told me, for instance, that, as a rough rule of thumb, the presence of verandas distinguished Hyde Park's 19th Century suburban houses from those built after annexation. I used that idea in the recent exhibit on old Hyde Park hotels to suggest that one purpose of their verandas was to connect architecturally with the older residential setting within which they stood. When we discovered that we were both postcard collectors, for some reason she asked if I had a card depicting the Eleanor Club One on 59th Street, which ultimately became

Breckenridge House. I did not. About a year and half ago, going through a box of postcards at a show, I found an Eleanor Club One view and from sight to thought only an instant passed, "Got it, Jean!"

On the north side of Regenstein Library there is a small parklike enclosure, accessible to the public, which Jean's family sponsored. On the east wall there is a memorial marker: "This garden honors the memory of Jean Friedberg Block 1912-1988" and lists the library's call numbers for her three books. Her ashes were spread upon the grounds of her beloved summer home near Mill Pond, Wisconsin.

Thanks to David Aftandilian, Judith Getzels, Ruth Grodzin, Douglas Mitchell, Grace Mary Rataj, Ann Rothchild, Harold Wolff and, especially, Elizabeth Block for their assistance. Published sources include: Julia Kramer, The House on the Hill: The Story of the Abeles Family of Leavenworth, Kansas (Chicago: 1990); Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter, Vol. 10, nos. 3-4 (October, 1988); History of Medicine and Surgery and Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago (Chicago, 1922); Who's Who in America Vol. 34 (Chicago, 1966) and various city directories.

Steve Treffman is the Society's archivist and a contributing editor of Hyde Park History.

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On Cable Cars and Lunch Rooms

EARLY STREETCARS IN HYDE PARK

Stephen A. Treffman

Contributing Editor

he articles that appeared in the Spring and Summer, 1997 issues of Hyde Park History on an earlier occupant of the building in which the

Hyde Park Historical Society's headquarters are now housed continue to attract attention. As you may remember, Alta Blakely reported on "Steve's Lunch," a small restaurant run by Greek immigrant Steve Megales that occupied these premises beginning around, it was thought, 1948. A very interesting letter has recently arrived that provides insights into an even earlier period in the history of the building.

The letter, which appears on page 10, is from the granddaughters of Turney Keller, the man who, they report, converted what was a cable car waiting room

into other uses. Mary Belle Keller Johnson and Judy Keller Levatino tell us chat, from as early as 1898 until 1952, the building was operated as a short order restaurant by the Keller family. Prior to 1898, they say, the building was used as a warming room for "trolley personnel." When placed within the context of the development of Hyde Park's public transportation systems, this new information adds greatly to our knowledge of the history and uses of our building.

CHICAGO STREET TRANSPORTATION ORIGINS

In the early years of Chicago's history, travel about the city's streets was accomplished on foot, by horseback or by horse and carriage. The latter could be hired with driver by the day or by the mile in cabs called hackneys or hacks. Omnibuses, large horse- ►8

<O drawn enclosed wagons with seating for multiple passengers, first appeared on Chicago streets on regular schedules in 1850. The introduction of street rail transportation in the city, however, began nearly 141 years ago when a horse drawn car line began operations on April 25, 1859. It was built by the privately owned Chicago City Railway Company

(CCR), which had been awarded the city's franchise for the South Side of the city. Two other companies held franchises for the city's north and west sides. The CCR cars ran on rails along State Street from Madison

Street to 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road). In the

months following, the company built an extension of the line first to 22nd Street (now Cermak Road), then eastward down 22nd Street to Cottage Grove Avenue and, finally, from Cottage Grove to 31st Street. The immediate goal of these extensions was to provide transportation to the Illinois State Fair, which, in the fall of 1859, was located on land along Cottage Grove. The major advantage of using rails (originally wooden beams wrapped in iron sheetmetal) for hauling wagons with passengers was that the rails provided smoother, more comfortable and faster transportation than could be obtained from wheels rolling over the irregular unpaved roads of the time. Basic street car fares of a nickel a ride were sec by city ordinance in 1859 and kept at that same level until 1919.

The demands and opportunities of population growth and commercial and industrial development in the city and its suburbs encouraged expansion of the CCR. The increase in the number of cars, horses and track owned and maintained by the CCR grew exponentially, as did ridership. In 1859, for example, the company consisted of only four cars and twenty five horses operating at twelve minute intervals on about three miles of track and carried many tens of thousands of passengers a year. Annual ridership rose to 3.5 million only three years later. By 1867 the CCR owned fifty-three cars and 375 horses, employed 198 men and operated over 12. 5 miles of track. The number of passengers that year totaled more than five million. Six years later, in 1873, the CCR was running seventy-five cars and 600 horses operating at four minute intervals on twenty-three miles of track and was transporting at least six million riders a year. Only seven years later, at the end of 1880, the system had more than doubled in size to 46.679 single track miles traversed by a fleet of 292 cars and 1,468 horses. In short, in that twenty year period, from 1859 to 1880, the company experienced growth that involved 15 .6 times more track, 58.7 times more horses, and 73 times more cars carrying many millions of passengers annually!

As the CCR expanded the length of its horse car lines to meet demand, problems of keeping its system coordinated and its costs under control grew apace.

The cars and rails, once installed, had long lives and were relatively inexpensive to keep up. Aside from the investment in manpower and supervision, the key variable in the cost of operating the system was the care and feeding of the horses. Although perhaps one or two horses might draw one car, they could only work four or five hours a day. This meant chat shifts of fresh horses had to be kept on hand for each horsecar in order to maintain a twelve or sixteen hour a day schedule. An entire system of men and equipment had to be developed around simply sustaining the horses. Moreover, the horse was relatively slow, not always reliable, susceptible to disease, and, glaringly apparent co one and all, associated with a "residue" on the streets chat raised public health concerns. One horse could produce as much as twenty-two pounds of manure a day. Its required disposal, in fact, actually became an ancillary business undertaking. All in all, then, there were problems associated with a large-scale system of horse drawn passenger cars chat were well recognized fairly early. This didn't mean that the CCR stopped building horse lines, only that its management was open to the idea of finding alternative forms of power to pull its cars. As it happened, Hyde Park would become the focus of the CCR's attention.

HYDE PARK AND ITS STREETCARS

There is more co the early history of streetcars in Hyde Park than cable cars. After the Civil War, the city's horse car lines began to look beyond Chicago's borders for their growth. On March 5, 1867, the Chicago and Calumet Horse and Dummy Railroad Company (CCHDRC), an affiliate of the CCR, was incorporated under Illinois law to establish street rail lines for "cars drawn by horses or cars with engines attached, commonly called dummy engines, for the carrying of passengers." Its focus of service was to be the area of Cook County south of the city's border at 39th Street and ease of State Street, in short, virtually the entire area of the Village of Hyde Park. A year later, in 1868, the Board of Supervisors for the Village of Hyde Park authorized this new CCR affiliate to lay tracks from 39th Street extending south from the CCR's preexisting tracks in Chicago proper.

Implementing this resolution launched the robust

expansion of the CCR in succeeding decades.

HORSE DRAWN CARS

Hyde Park's streetcar system apparently went through two phases prior to the introduction of the cable cars. The first of these, an unexpected finding, was that horse drawn streetcars seem to have run on rails down 55th Street in Hyde Park. A map that dates from chat period (Wright: 1870) specifically identifies a horse car line running down Cottage

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OLD STREET CARS

Horse and Cable Cars

at the Museum of Science and Industry, postcard view c.1942 (publisher unknown). Believed to be, at least in part, replicas, probably built for the 1933 Century of Progress, these are on permanent display at the museum.

Grove from 39th Street and then swinging around to 55th Street east to what is now Lake Park Avenue.

This is, however, the only then contemporary source found so far chat suggests that a horse-drawn streetcar rail line ever existed along 55th Street. This line would have been pare of the expansion arising from that 1868 authorizing resolution. The CCR built tracks in Chicago further south primarily along Scace Street and Cottage Grove Avenue to then unstated terminal points. In ensuing years, lines were built on ocher streets both ease and west of Cottage Grove with 47th and 63rd Streets becoming the major ease/west routes to southwest Chicago. All of these new CCR streetcar lines were powered solely by horses. Thus was established the early outlines of the course public transportation would ultimately cake on the South Side of Chicago.

THE STEAM DUMMY

The reference to steam driven rail cars on city streets in the CCHDRC incorporation papers indicate chat replacing horse drawn street cars with an alternative system of motive power was already a possibility in the minds of the CCR's management at least as early as 1867. The usefulness of steam driven technology in manufacturing and, especially, in interurban rail transport was already well established throughout the country. In fact, a steam driven streetcar is said to have operated along Broadway on Chicago's north side as early as 1864. Ac some point after 1867 the CCR and its affiliate decided to introduce them in their system, not in the city itself

but in and around Hyde Park. Assuming that a horse drawn line initially ran along Cottage and down 55th Street, this steam dummy would have been the second phase in the development of public streetcar transportation in the community.

While there is no question that steam driven streetcars chugged down Cottage Grove and 55th Street, there remains much that is unclear about their actual history. No picture of one, for example, has yet surfaced. The Hyde Park-Kenwood National Bank published a booklet in 1929 with a photograph purportedly that of Hyde Park's steam dummy.

Research, however, has revealed that the photograph is actually of an engine from an entirely different Chicago streetcar company. While the exact dimensions of the Cottage Grove/Hyde Park steam dummy are not known, information about similar vehicles from that period suggests what the one used in Hyde Park probably was like.

Commonly, to minimize terrorizing horses along the street, these small locomotives were built within frames chat resembled a shortened version of a regular horse drawn trailer. The car would have run on four wheels with probably no more than seven feet from the middle of the front wheels to the middle of the ones in the rear. Likely, it was operated by a two-cycle engine powered by steam from a vertical boiler heated by burning anthracite coal or coke to minimize smoke and soot. The engine carriage was designed ostensibly to muffle the noise of escaping steam and engine

operation by means of shielding and roof top steam condensers. It was this latter characteristic, the ►8

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-c@ reduction of noise, as well as the horse car appearance, that provided the underlying meaning to the name "dummy engine," that is, silent or "dumb," as in "unable to speak." These small locomotives pulled no more than one or two passenger trailers along the three miles of stronger steel track installed on Cottage Grove from 39th Street to 55th Street and east to Lake Park Avenue. When not in use, these engines and their trailers were probably stored in a car barn at 38th Street and Cottage, adjacent to the stables where the horses were kept. It is not known how many steam dummies operated on the Hyde Park

line nor how their return runs were accomplished, that is, by reversing gears or being turned on a platform.

Also in question is the date when steam dummies were actually introduced into Hyde Park. Block (1977) offers the date of 1869 for that event and cites as her source Pierce (1940). Pierce, in tutn, makes reference only to the governing legal authorizations and to Weber (1936). Weber, however, fudges on the date by noting those 1868 actions by the Village Board permitting the building of street rails in Hyde Park but not when the actual construction took place. As was earlier suggested, operating on that Cottage Grove/5 5th Street line in 1869 may have been a horse line rather than a steam dummy, two very different forms of power. At another extreme is a photograph from a 1943 collection at the Chicago Historical

Society with a caption stating that a steam driven street car began running in Hyde Park in 1881. Indeed, a map dated 1881 in Bluestone (1991) clearly denotes a steam line running down Cottage Grove and turning east at 55th Street to Lake Park but this does not preclude the possibility that steam dummies were running there before 1881. Moreover, this would have been precisely the time that CCR officials were already planning to replace horse cars and steam dummies with cable cars. A more persuasive date emerges from an unpublished street transportation chronology developed in 193 3 now in the collection of the Chicago Transit Authority. It places the introduction of the Hyde Park steam dummy in the year 1874.

This date seems in reasonable accord with the state of Hyde Park's development and the known history of the CCR. It would also fit with the presumption that a horse car line preceded the steam dummy in time. Uncovering more substantial corroborating information in support of any one of these dates remains a challenge.

Usually overlooked in the few references to this steam car is that of the almost 46 miles of Chicago City Railway Company track existing in 1881, only those three miles of track along Cottage and 55th, the Hyde Park line, were used for steam driven streetcars. These steam dummies may have been an attempt by the CCR to compete directly with the Illinois

CHICAGO CITY RAILWAY COTTAGE GROVE LINE CABLE CAR AND TRAILERS

View is on Wabash Avenue during a summer day. The trailers were originally horse drawn cars.

During the winter, closed cars with small stoves for heat were used to carry

passengers.

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Central's steam locomotives chat ran along the lake. The one-way nickel fare for a streetcar ride was half chat for a commute downtown from 55th Street on the Illinois Central but it was a much slower trip. In addition, these engines may have been considered somewhat more fitting, modern and substantial for

the prestigious community they served. Hyde Park's Trustees, recognizing the mess that accompanied horse drawn streetcars, may even have insisted on steam power. It was also on this portion of the line that the streets were paved with granite to support the heavier rails and engines required by the steam dummy. As a result, these were among the better-paved roads in the city and its suburbs.

Unfortunately, street locomotives produced a good deal more noise than advertised, frightening horses and annoying pedestrians. Worse, for a variety of reasons, street car companies found chat these steam dummy cars proved to be no less expensive to operate than had been the horse cars. CCR managers were spurred to look at another alternative, one being developed in California. The days of the Hyde Park steam dummy engines were numbered. The last one to run its route did so early in 1887.

THE CABLE CAR

In the early 1870s Andrew S. Halladie, a wire manufacturer in California, developed a system wherein passenger cars ran up and down the hilly streets of downtown San Francisco on rails by means of a moving cable buried under the streets. It began operations in 1873 and its success spurred further

expansion there throughout the '70s. Chicago City Railway officers, alerted to that success, traveled to San Francisco in 1880 to study its cable system.

Realizing that if a system like that could operate on such variable terrain, it would probably work especially well upon the gentler topography of Chicago. They returned home and Charles B. Holmes, CCR's president, quickly obtained approval of the company's board and Chicago's city council to begin establishing cable car transport along many of the same Chicago streets on which they had run their horse cars.

Construction began in June, 1881 and by January, 1882, the CCR formally introduced cable cars into Chicago's public transportation system, the second such system in the United States. The first trains, usually consisting of a grip car and one or two trailers, ran on the State Street line; a second line was established on Wabash Avenue. These downtown cable cars traveled over a turnaround that went from State Street to Wabash Avenue via Lake Street and

Madison Street, a layout that Hilton (1954) and others have insisted first gave the "Loop" its name not, as is often assumed, the elevated train loop which came later.

The Wabash/Cottage Grove horse car line was converted in 1882 to cable car use from Madison Street to 39th Street. In 1887, the Cottage Grove line was extended from 39th to 67th Street and 55th Street was converted to cable use. In 1890, after the annexation of Hyde Park, the Cottage Grove cable car

system was extended south to 71st Street, the ►<3

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-< Ci, south entrance to Oakwoods Cemetery and the edge of the Grand Crossing district. Cable cars proved less expensive co run than horse or steam power, were more acceptable to the public and apparently made money for the company. As a result, cable lines were built elsewhere in Chicago by the city's two other major street railway companies. Indeed, these companies eventually created the largest cable car system in the United States with thirty-four cable lines, 710 grip cars and 82 miles of double track and passenger traffic that peaked at 237 million riders in 1892. Moreover, the successful expansion of Chicago's cable lines during the 1880s spurred the development of cable systems in most other large American cities.

Winter weather had always been a challenge to

Chicago's streetcars but purportedly cable cars proved adept in meeting it. The steam cars may have been more effective than horse drawn cars du'ring the winter due co their weight. Cable cars, however, were said co be even more successful in the face of ice and snow.

Installed at a depth of four feet below street level (a foot deeper than the ones in San Francisco) so that they resisted freezing, the cables ran within an iron and concrete enclosure with openings at the bottom that allowed water and snow co escape into a trough below ground. Travel on these cars during the winter, however, was rugged particularly for the conductor, who stood exposed co the elements. Although there were winter enclosures installed on the trailers and various kinds of stoves introduced co heat the cars, passengers were encouraged to wear heavy outerwear. Straw was scattered on floors co insulate passenger's feet from the cold floorboards. While one may have been able to make a trip on the only lightly insulated grip car or the enclosed trailers from Lake Park co downtown Chicago in perhaps sixty minutes, during Chicago's bitter winters, the experience itself must have seemed a good deal longer for all on board. The same ride on a horse drawn car, however, would have taken perhaps three times as long. For many the cable car was viewed as a marvelous improvement.

THE 55TH STREET CABLE CAR LINE

The driving technology of a cable car system consisted of a stationary building in which steam boilers powered iron wheels or pulleys around which ran an "endless" cable installed underground along city streets upon which cars moved. The Hyde Park powerhouse, constructed in 1887, was located on the north east corner of Cottage Grove Avenue and 55th Street, land on which The University of Chicago's Friend Family Health Care Clinic now stands. It operated both the 39th/Cottage Grove and the 55th Street lines and later the cable to 71st Street. Two Babcock and Williams' steam engines powered by three low grade coal burning boilers turned two

upright pulleys, twenty-five feet in diameter, around which the cable flowed. As the cables came off these vertical pulleys they were wound around a smaller horizontal pulley that moved the cables under the street. The cars that actually were in touch with the cable were termed grip cars because it was by means of a device managed by the conductor that either grabbed onto or released the cable. Grip the cable, the car moved with the cable; release the grip and apply the brake, and the car came to a halt.

Cable cars traveled at three times the speed of the old horse drawn cars. Since there was no gradual build-up to speed, every time the grip was applied riders would have experienced a sharp jolt against the hard wooden seats as the grip grabbed onto the moving line beneath the street.

The CCR grip cars were four wheeled, sixteen to nineteen feet long, ten feet four inches high, wooden vehicles with seating for twenty passengers and the grip operator. Each grip car could pull up to three trailers, each with seating for forty passengers and a train man. The signage on the 55th Street cable grips identified them as the "Hyde Park" line. The cars followed an unusual route. From Cottage Grove, they glided east at about twelve miles per hour straight down 55th Street co what is now Harper Avenue.

There they began a six miles per hour counter clockwise circuit turning south to a half block past 56th Street where they traveled east, through what is now private housing, to Lake Park Avenue. Turning north on Lake Park and passing what is now our headquarters, the cars then curved around the corner to move west again on 55th Street to Cottage Grove. At the end of the workday, the grips and trailers would be housed at a car barn at 38th Street and Cottage Grove.

The Hyde Park turnaround, which ran on a separate cable 3,868 feet long, was called Cable Court, although the name usually was applied specifically to that section between Harper and Lake Park between 56th and 57th Streets. The cable itself was moved by means of power transferred from the longer 55th street cable through speed reduction gears located underground on Harper Avenue. A major reason for building the Cable Court loop was probably to allow a convenient connection for commuters with the Illinois Central's South Park Station which was located on the east side of Lake Park immediately north of 57th Street. It may also have served to protect the cable by reducing problems in turning the grip cars. There is also a possibility that some form of this loop may have been in existence at the time of the steam dummy.

The Cable Court loop, it should be emphasized, was in place before our building was built, perhaps by as many as five or six years. Various maps from 1888 and 1890 clearly display the cable loop but none show the

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building. In fact, there may have been no thought 0t-• the Midway. The Hyde even given to constructing such a building in the first '. ¼,_o • <f!6 Park/5 5th Street line was place. It was only after 1890 when it was clear to all '. O• ,,. • tA, renamed the "Jackson that the Columbian Exposition would actually - ' \ °' \o4- <l\1.,,a.°" ._ Park." The extended

cake place in Jackson Park chat plans for the \ iiotG ;, length of the Cable

building likely were begun. The •. Court loop proved a

building itself was almost certainly \ • boon in loading and

built, probably by the Illinois '. #>• unloading passengers. On

Central Railroad itself, \ Chicago Day, October 9, during the year prior 1893, the day of the Fair's highest

to the Fair, that is, attendance, crowds of some 500,000

1892-93, when the people practically overwhelmed the system.

embankment and Many young men, dressed in suits, their heads viaducts elevating the topped by bowler hats, happily climbed up on the

railroad's tracks were roofs of the cable cars to make the trip to Jackson Park. being constructed. As a Cable cars and their associated equipment were on result there was a physical prominent display at the World's Fair but the year

separation of the waiting 1893 also marked the moment when electricity had

rooms and ticket selling sites already been recognized as a more efficient and flexible

for IC commuters and cable car form of power for street railways. Despite appearances, passengers. The great old 12th Street IC depot, now cable was on its way out. The initial introduction of demolished, was built at the same time and the red electricity to power Chicago's streetcars in 1893 led to brick and scone used in its construction may have been a progressive dismantling of the cable car system chat similar to chat used in building our headquarters. The finally ended in 1906. The 55th Street/Jackson Park main point here is simply chat the cable loop was not cable line was among the lase to go having served the a result of the opening of the Fair, but the building community for nearly twenty years. Overhead electric itself was. lines were installed and the cables and gears were

Probably the most vulnerable point in the cable car removed. The cable car era ended and the era of the system was the cable itself. The CCR cable consisted trolley car line began in Hyde Park. (The "trolley" is of a hemp core, surrounded by 96 steel wires wound the pulley attached co the pole chat touches and rolls into six strands of 16 wires each. The 1 1/4-inch chick along the electric wire strung above the street.) Cable line, however, was subject to wear and breakage from Court kept its name and electric streetcars and trolley use, age or accident. For example, the approximate life buses followed its loop well into the present century. It of the 10,856 feet long cable line along 55th Street finally was dismantled during the urban renewal era. was 167 days. If the grip were applied incorrectly it It should be noted that the emergence of each

could slice or dangerously damage the cable. When a succeeding street rail technology did not immediately major problem developed in one segment of the cable, preclude the existence of the ones preceding. By 1892, the entire system of which it was a part ground to an for instance, the year before the Fair, the CCR had abrupt hale while repairs were made. Cables were fixed 2,611 horses, almost double the number it had in

by splices made on site or replaced entirely by splicing 1880. Only one-third of the CCR revenues, however, a new line into the existing line, running it was derived from the horse car lines, the remainder completely through the entire system and then coming largely from its cable operations. Electric splicing together the two ends of the new line. lines, as well, were just being introduced. By 1895,

The impact of the cable car line on the economy of Chicago's streets, particularly in the downtown area, Hyde Park was immediate. The Economist (Chicago) for were filled with a melange of streetcars, some powered December 8, 1888 reported: "The development for by horses, others by cables, and still others by business purposes of Fifty-Fifth Streec... has been electricity. Steam also powered trains on the suburban largely due to the cable car line... The prices for commuter lines and, for several years during the mid- property on Fifty-Fifth have risen from $50 to $100 a 1890s, the city's elevated rail lines. This mixture was foot, and over twenty stores are in process of erection finally resolved in favor of electricity as the

on the street." The street's commercial past was set for predominant power source for streetcars by 1906 and the next sixty-five years. the Illinois Central commuter line, by 1926.

During the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, Horses, moreover, remained a factor on Chicago's cable cars were a major source of transportation for streets. There were an estimated 120,000 horses in millions of visitors. Cable cars offered close access to Chicago in 1895. Though fading rapidly from use

the Fair's entrances at 57th Street and, on Cottage, at after the turn of the century as power for city ►tD

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--<fj streetcars and fire engines, they remained important in the city's private transportation system well into the present century for recreational use and for hauling delivery wagons. Some of our readers may still remember the horse drawn wagons in Hyde Park that delivered ice and fresh vegetables to people's homes. A painting at our headquarters portrays an old horse drawn milk wagon that once operated in Hyde Park. The wagon stood abandoned for many years east of the IC tracks at 57ch Street.

IN CLOSING

While the street cable car today is often viewed merely as a quaint relic of the past, the scuff of charm bracelets, toys, advertising gimmicks and assorted other memorabilia usually associated with San Francisco, it has a quite legitimate and notable role in American, Chicago and, certainly, Hyde Park history. The story of the cable car in Chicago is most obviously tied to the evolution of public transportation and residential, industrial and commercial development in the city, in general, and to Hyde Park and its nearby suburban neighbors, in particular, both before and after annexation. Moreover, it provided the public access to the South Park system and may well have been a factor in establishing some of its boundaries. In essence, the horse-drawn and later the cable car performed the same function for these areas that the Illinois Central Railroad commuter line had played initially in the emergence of Hyde Park. Indeed, together the two spurred the growth of Hyde Park

and the South Side generally throughout that century and beyond.

Chicago has often been referred to as a city of neighborhoods. In earlier periods in Chicago's history, one of the things that helped define chose neighborhoods was the streetcar lines. The unintended effect, however, was, to a certain degree, their influence on the emergence and reinforcement of artificial social, ethnic and racial boundaries. The "other" side of the tracks was given a new, big city twist that could evoke social conflict, at times bitter or even violent. On the ocher hand, the elaboration of the public transportation system opened up to Chicagoans new opportunities not only for better physical mobility but also for enhanced residential, investment, employment and recreational choices as well.

The extension of public street and rail transportation in and around Hyde Park had an impact on the question of the annexation of Hyde Park to Chicago. It had the effect of drawing Hyde Park and its population closer to Chicago, both in a temporal and economic sense, while at the same time enabling the emergence of multiple centers of political, social and economic interests outside of

Hyde Park Center. Each new line established, each new set of tracks laid, was yet another direct link between the city and villagers of Greater Hyde Park.

The political power that had been wielded by the pioneers in Hyde Park Center (who opposed annexation) was diluted in the face of population increases and the emergence of new and powerful economic and political interests elsewhere in the suburb. As a result, annexation proponents would claim that the old style of governance was outmoded and simply inadequate to the new situation. One may also speculate that the concentration of more advanced street transport in che northern section of Hyde Park contributed to a sense of deprivation expressed by citizens in the southern portions of the village. It is no surprise that when the annexation question was put to the voters of Hyde Park Village in 1887 and 1889, the voting majority chat decided the issue in favor of annexation came largely from the wards outside the old center of Hyde Park.

The cable car waiting room on Lake Park apparently directly served the transit system for less than a decade, perhaps as few as five years, if our correspondents' date for its conversion into a lunch room, 1898, is correct. The months of the Fair, then, would have been the peak period of its connections to the cable cars. In that sense, the building is a genuine artifact of both the Columbian Exposition and of the Cable Car era.

The building was located near the Illinois Central stops at 55th and 57th Streets, the Cable Court streetcars and the hotels and small shops along Lake Park and 55th and 57th Streets, all of which generated considerable sidewalk traffic. This location provided the logic for its more than half-century of existence as a lunch room. It became a working man's cafe that served large portions to customers at a reasonable price. The demise of the building's use as a lunch room probably was as much a function of residential and commercial changes occurring in Hyde Park as it was sheer obsolescence of the facility as an eatery.

Ownership of the building remained with the Illinois

Central Railroad until it was sold to our Society in 1977.

There is something wonderfully resonant, perhaps

even ironic, that this working man's building has become the home of an historical society for a community driven by issues and conflicts generated both by elitist aspirations and social diversity. This same transaction, however, has practical consequences in the present as our Society seeks to respond effectively to the reality and complexity of our community's history.

Finally, assembly lines were offshoots of cable car technology as are ski lifts. A less obvious connection can be drawn between cable cars and another then-

\V nfcr 1999-2000

contemporaneous technological development: the elevator. They had similar components such as cables, pulleys, gears, and rails and, originally, both were run by steam powered engines. The cable car operated horizontally while the elevator ran vertically.

Although cable driven street cars disappeared as a major urban transportation system, the related technology embodied by the elevator continued to power and be shaped by the emergence of new techniques for the construction of caller buildings for offices, commerce and residential living. The skyscraper, in general, and, particularly in Hyde Park, the large apartment hotel, were two of its results...but that is another story. CD

Steve Treffman is our Society's archivist and is preparing another exhibition on Hyde Park's hotels for display at 01,r headquarters later this year.

Thanks to the staff from the Chicago Transit Authority for its assistance.

Selected Sources:

Jean Block, Hyde Park Houses, (Chicago, 1977). Daniel

M. Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, (New Haven, 1991). George W. Hilton, "Cable Railways of Chicago," Bulletin Number 10, (Chicago: Electric Railway Historical Society, 1954). George W. Hilton, The Cable Car in America, (San Diego, 1982). James D. Johnson, A Century of Chicago Streetcars, 1858-1958, (Wheaton, Illinois, 1964). Alan R. Lind, Chicago Surface Lines: An Illmtrated History, 3rd edition, (Park Forest, Illinois, 1986). Milo Roy Maltbie, ed. The Street Railways of Chicago, (Chicago, 1901). John A. Miller, Fares Please/, (New York, 1941). Samuel W. Norton, Chicago Traction: A History Legislative and Political, (Chicago, 1907). Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, Vol. 2, (New York, 1940). Frank Rowsome, Jr., Trolley Car Treasury, (New York, 1956). Harry Perkins Weber, comp., Outline History of Chicago Traction, (Chicago, 1936). John H. White, Jr., "Steam in the Streets: The Grice and Long Dummy," Technology and Cttlture Vol. 27 (1986), pp. 106-9. John

S. Wright, Chicago: Past, Present, Future, (Chicago: Board of Trade: 1868, Second edition, 1870).

LUNCH ROOM AT

5529 S. LAKE PARK AVE. C.1935

From Keller Family Collection

The triangular shaped window on the left may originally have served as a booth for selling tickets to cable car riders during the World's Columbian Exposition. On the right is a wooden box, which held coal during the winter for use in a pot-bellied stove that warmed the building. A Coca-Cola sign may be seen on the wall at the right side of the photograph. Now the headquarters of the Hyde Park Historical Society.

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Letter to the Editor

To Whom It May Concern:

In 1898, our grandfather, Turney Keller, opened the "Lunchroom" at 5529 Lake Avenue, which is now the Hyde Park Historical Society. (Ed. note: Lake Avenue was renamed Lake Park Avenue on April 14, 1913.) With the help of his two sons, Hosey (Harvey) and Charles Keller, the restaurant was continuously in operation until 1952. (Ed. note: One of the interviewees for the earlier articles thought that the restaurant had changed hands in 1948.)

Our grandfather with the help of his sons, leased the building for the entire time. We have no idea how much money was involved. He did have an accident on a trolley losing one arm, not two legs. (Ed. note: One of our correspondents in our earlier article had speculated that the IC had leased the building to Mr. Keller at no cost because he had lost two legs in a railroad accident.)

Before 1898, the building was used as a warming house for trolley personnel. The men gathered around the old pot belly stove and, we're sure, told some great stories. The notion that some food could be served came to our grandfather in 1898.

When our grandfather died in 1922, the boys, known as the Keller Brothers, took over the "Lunchroom." Their wives, Louetta and Marsha, also worked in the restaurant.

At the crack of dawn, breakfast was served. We can still remember the many aromas of home cooking.

Bacon and eggs and oatmeal in the morning and if you looked at the wall one could see the specials for lunch, such as vegetable soup and meat loaf. There were no printed menus. The clientele was an integrated mixture of working males in Hyde Park. The counter was in two sections seating about twelve.

Our families spent many long hours making the "Lunchroom" very successful. The information above is correct according to documented papers from this time period. We have included various pictures for a visual remembrance of the times.

Sincerely,

Mary Bell Keller Johnson and Judy Keller Levantino

Ms. Johnson, the daughter of Harvey Ketler, in a phone interview, told us that the lunch room was closed evenings and on Sundays. She herself was born at her family's residence on the 54th block of Harper Avenue. Turney's family was Christian Scientist and probably was a member of the 10th Church of Christ Scientist at 57th and Blackstone, now the vacant St. Stephen's Church. Ms. Levantino, her cousin, is the daughter of Charles Ketler. -S.A.T.

PROPRIETORS OF THE "LUNCH ROOM" AT 5529 S. LAKE PARK AVENUE

Postcard view c.1915 from the Keller family collection.

From left: Turney Keller and his two sons Charles, and Hosey (Harvey), the eldest of the two. Note the wooden plank sidewalk in front of the building. Turney lost his left arm in a trolley accident. Members of the family are buried in Oakwoods Cemetery.

w ll C 1999-2000

We Remember Jim Stronks --.

Jim Stronks was one of the Society's most generous historian-writers. His contributions to Hyde Park History were outstanding-articles dealing with subjects as diverse as Shipwrecks off Hyde Park and Alonzo Stagg-as well as those mentioned below. It was Jim who suggested the name Hyde Park History for our publication. "That's what it's about, " he said. The remembrance below was written by his long time friend and colleague Mary Sidney.

James B. Stronks died on September 4, 1999 in Iowa City. He had moved from Chicago to his hometown after learning he had leukemia. Readers of the Society's Newsletter will recall Jim as the author of lively, probingly researched articles about Iittle known corners of Hyde Park/Chicago history: the building where William Jennings Bryan made his "Cross of Gold" speech, the Hyde Park Hotel where widowed Mary Lincoln spent a 'sad summer, and Camp Douglas where sick and dying Confederate soldiers were imprisoned. Jim loved history, especially of 19th century America. Absorbed in research, he was perhaps happiest studying old books, old letters, old maps, old newspapers, diaries, deeds, and wills, whatever. He had a microscopic knowledge of the Civil War.

Completing a PhD at the University of Chicago after Army service in World War 11, Jim was for many years professor of American Literature at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of many articles and reviews.

But he was also: a Hyde Parker, runner ( in the 70s and 80s), hiker in the Alps and Yorkshire moors and elsewhere, biker in France and Italy, a museum and gallery patron,

Notes From the Archives

Ottr appreciation to the following friends for their gifts to the Archives:

• Nicholas Fulop, Quadrangle Club director, for his gift of a copy of Emily Kadens, The Quadrangle Club. I 893-1993: Creating a Sense of Society (The Club: 1998).

• Herbert Kalk, for thirty-one original posters advertising the Hyde Park/57th Street Art Fair (all were on display at our headquarters in 1997 during the fair's fiftieth anniversary year celebration).

• Tom Pavelec, for his assistance in securing the above donation.

• Berenice Boehm, for her donation of the book Souvenir of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893).

• Leon and Marian Despres, for twenty-five Hyde Park related books, one a 1923 directory for much of the city and its suburbs listing the names of residents, their addresses, and the cars they drove.

• Gayle Janowitz, for two urban renewal related

CSO subscriber, movie goer, and dog enthusiast, faithfully attending the annual April kennel club show and the Run with Rover race in Lincoln Park.

He was a formidable teacher! Much praised and admired by serious students, feared and disliked by the lazy. Every minute was accounted for in his classrooms-no idle chit-chat, no dead time-every student paper was painstakingly corrected or commented upon; not an error escaped. His office at UIC was a wonder itself, almost painfully neat, not one book or well sharpened pencil out of place. And Jim himself: tall slender, upright, suit pressed, tie straight, shoes gleaming, spectacles shining, and on good days, blue eyes alive with a bit of whimsy or mischief.

Always busy in the retirement home in Iowa City, he led a film series, as a lark joined the Lions Club, biked into the Iowa countryside, became a bird watcher in spite of himself, poked about in small towns and country graveyards taking photographs, made friends with local dogs, and was always on the prowl for an interesting bit of overlooked history.

He was also a witty man, fond of (usually) amiable irony and satire. He'd call a friend long distance to share jokes he'd heard. True, he had eccentricities: he steadfastly opposed alleged improvements like answering machines, computers, and e-mail; until 1998 he typed all articles and correspondence on a beloved elderly upright manual Underwood until he could no longer buy parts for it.

We are very grateful to Mary Sidney for her thoughtful and evocative picture of Jim. We do deeply regret his early death and miss his generous participation in the Society's endeavors.

maps, among other smaller items.

• Sidney Williams, Jr., for, among other items, two chairs from Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens that once stood at 60th and Cottage Grove and a remarkable old medicine bottle from a pharmacy once located at 57th Street and Lake Park.

• Harold Wolff, for a major gift of some three hundred and twenty-five Hyde Park related books, magazines

and notebooks of articles that he collected over a period of twenty-five years. His generosity has filled major gaps in our collection and expanded it dramatically.

• Beth Wood, for a photocopy of White City Magazine, Vol.2. No. 1 (May, 1906) which provides an early look at one of the great Chicago amusement parks that once stood at 63rd and Cottage Grove.

We also have received from Katherine Erickson the well-used passport of Ida de Pencier who died at the end of 1998 at the age of 102. Ida moved out of town to live near relatives last summer but before she left Chicago she took pains to inform the Society of her new mailing address. She was a very loyal supporter of our work and she will be missed.

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;)0U;)AV )f d d¥T ·s 62:

i\ld!JOS flD!lOlS!H )jlBd dPAJ--I

VOL 21 NOs 3 & 4 Published by the Hyde Purk Hisu1riwl ">11riety WINTER 1999-2000

On Cable Cars and Lunch Rooms

EARLY STREETCARS IN HYDE PARK

Stephen A. Treffman

C1mtrdmting Editor

he articles char appeared in che Spring and Summer, 1997 issues of H ydc: Park History on an earlier occupant of the building m which rhe

Hyde Park Historical Society's head4uarcers are now housed continue ro attract attention As you may remember, Alea Blakely reporred on "Steve's Lunch," a small restaurant run by Greek immigrant Steve Mega1es that occupied these premises beginning around, ic was thought, 1948. A very inreresc1ng letter has recently arrived char provides insights into an even earlier period in the history of the building.

The letter, which appears on page 10, is from the granddaughters of Turney Keller, the man who, they report, converred what was a cable car waiting room

mro other uses. Mary Belle Keller Johnson and Judy Keller Levactno cell us chat, from as early as 1898 until 1952, the building was operated as a short order restaurant by rhe Keller family. Prior to 1898, they

.s,1y, the building was used as a warming room for "trolley personnel." When placed within the context nf the Jevelopmenr of Hyde Park's public cmnsporracion systems. this new information adds greatly to our knowledge of the history and uses of our building.

CHICAGO STREET TRANSPORTATION ORIGINS

ln the early years of Chicago's history, travel about the city's screers was accomplished on foot, by horseback or by horse and carriage. The Jarcer could be hired with driver by the day or by the mile in cabs called hackneys or hacks. Omnibuses, large horse- ►8

-<O drawn enclosed wagons with se:mng for mulciple passengers, first appeared on Chicago strttts on regular schedules in 1850. The inlroJuction of street rail rransporcarion in the city, however, began nearly 141 years ago when a horse drawn car line began operations on April 25, 1859. It was built by che privately owned Chicago City Railway Company (CCR), which had been awarded the city's franchise for the South Side of the city. Two ocher companies held franchises for rhe city's norrh and wesr :.ides, The CCR cars ran on ratls 11long Scace Street from Madison Street to 12th Screec (now Roosevelt RoaJ). Jn rhe months fotlowing, the company built an extension of the line first to 22nd Street (now Cermak Road), then rasrward down 22nd Srreer ro Cottage Grove Avenuc and, finally, from Cottage Grove to 31st Streec. The immediate goal of these extensions was to provide cransportat1on to the Illinois Scare Fair. which, in the fall of 1859, was located on land along Cottage Grove. The major advantage of using rails (originally wooden beams wrapped in jron sheecmecal) for hauling w;1gorn, with passengers was chat che rails provided smoother, more comfortable and fasrer cransporrarion rhan coulJ be obrnined from wheels roJljng over the irregular unpaved roads of the time. Basic street car fares of a n1Ckel a ride were set by city ordinance in 18'>9 and kept at that same level until 1919.

The demanJs and opportunities of population growth and commercial and industrial development i11 the city and irs suburbs encouraged expansion of rhe CCR. The increase in the number of cars, horses .rnd track owned and maintained by the CCR grew exponentially, as did ridership. In 1859, for example, the company consisted of only four cars and twenty five horses operating ar twelve minute inct'rval:; on about three miles of track and carried many tens of thousands of passengers a year. Annual ridership rost· to j.5 million only three years b.ter. By I 867 the CCR owned fifty-three cars and 375 horses, employt'd 198 men and operated over 12.5 mile.s of track. The number of passengers chat year totaled more than five million. Six years later, in 187.3, the CCR was runnin seventy-five cars and 600 horses operating ar four minute intervals on twenty-three miles of track and was transporting ac least six million riders a year. Only seven years later, at che enJ of 1880, che sy:.cem had more than doubled in size ro 46.679 single track miles eraversed by a fleet of 292 cars and l ,468 horses. Jn shore, in char twenty year period, from 1859 ro 1880, the company experienced growth that involved 15.6 cimes more track, 58.7 cimes more hotses, and 73 times mote cars carrying many millions of passengers annually!

As the CCR expanded che length of its horse car linl's to meet demand, problems of keeping its system coordinated and its costs under concrol grew apace.

The cars antl rads, once tnscalled, haJ long lives and Wl're relatively inexpensive co keep up. Aside from the investment in manpower and supervision, the ke) variable in the c:osc of oper.mng rhe system was the Lare .rnd feeding of che horses. A!though perhaps one or cwo horses might draw one car, they could only work four or Five hours a day. This meant rhat shifts of fresh horses bad to be kept on hand for each horSl'Cilr

in order co maincatn a twelve or sixteen hour a day chedule. An entire system of men anJ eyuipmenr had to be developed around simply sustaining the hors,::,. Moreover, the horse was relatively slow, not always reliable, susceptiblt co dist•ase, and, glaringly apparent to one and all, associated with a "residue" on lhe srreets th H raised pub I1c heal ch umcerns. One horse rnuld produce .ts much as twency-cwo pounds of manure a day. Its requtred disposal, in facr, actually became an ancillary business undertaking. All tn all, then, rhere were problems ,1ssociated with a large-scale system of horse Jrawn passenger cars char were well ret0gn1zed fairly tarly. This didn't mean chat rhe CCR stopped building horse l111es, only that its management was open co the idea of findmg alternative forms of rower co pull its cars. As it happeneJ. Hyde Park would become rhe forus of the: CCR's attention.

HYDE PARK AND ITS STREETCARS

There is more to the early history of screttcars in Hyde Park than cable cars. After the Civil War, che cjty's horse uir lint began co look beyond Chicago's borders for their growth. On March 5, 1867, che Chicago and Calumet Horse and Dummy Railroad Company (CCHDRC), an affiliate of rhe CCR, was incorporated under Illinois law to establish srreer rail Imes for ''cars drawn by horses or cars w1rh engines attached. commonly called <lummy engine!I, for the carrying of passengers." Irs focus of service was to be thtt area of Cook County south of the city's border at

)9th Street and east ofSrate Street, in short, virtually the entire area of the Village of Hyde Park. A year later, 111 1868, che Board of Supervisors for the Village of Hyde Park authorized this new CCR affiliate to l.ty cracks from 39th Street exrenJmg south from rhe CCR's preexisting tracks in Chicago proper

Implememing chis resolution launched the robust expansion of the CCR in succeeding decades.

HORSE DRAWN CARS

Hyde Park's streetcar system apparently went rhrough two phases prior to the introduction of the cable cars. Th<: first of these, an unexpected finding, was char horse drawn streetcars seem co have run 011 rails down 55th Screer in Hyde Park. A map that dart's from that period (Wright: 1870) specifically identifies a horse car line running down Cottage

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OLD STREET CARS

Horse and Cable Cars

at the Museum of Science and Industry, postcard view c.1942 (publisher unknown). Believed to be, at least in part, replicas, probably built for the 1933 Century of Progress,

these are on permanent

display at the museum.

Grove from 39th Street and then swinging around to 55th Street ease to what is now Lake Park Avenue.

This is, however, the only then contemporary source found so far chat suggests chat a horse-drawn streetcar rail line ever existed along 55th Srreer. This line would have been part of the expansion arising from that 1868 authorizing resolution. The CCR built tracks in Chicago further south primarily along State Street and Cocrage Grove Avenue co then unstated terminal points. In ensuing years, lines were built on other streets both east and west of Cottage Grove with 47th and 63rd Streets becoming the major ease/west routes to southwest Chicago. All of these new CCR streetcar lines were powered solely by horses. Thus was established the early outlines of the course public transportation would ulrimacely take on che South Side of Chicago.

THE STEAM DUMMY

The reference co steam driven rail cars on city streets in the CCHDRC incorporation papers indicate char replacing horse drawn street cars with an alternative system of motive power was already a possibility in the minds of che CCR's management ac leasr as early as 1867. The usefulness of steam driven technology in manufacturing and, especially, in interurban rail transport was already well established throughout the country. In face, a steam driven streetcar is said to have operated along Broadway on Chicago's north side as early as 1864. At some point after 1867 the CCR and its affiliate decided co introduce chem in their system, not in che city itself

buc in and around Hyde Park. Assuming chat a horse drawn line initially ran along Cottage and down 55th Street, this steam dummy would have been the second phase in the development of public streetcar transporration in che community_

While there is no question that steam driven

streetcars chugged down Cottage Grove and 55th Street, there remains much that is unclear about their actual hiscory. No picture of one, for example, has yet surfaced. The Hyde Park-Kenwood National Bank published J. booklet in 1929 with a photograph purportedly chat of Hyde Park's sream dummy.

Research, however, has revealed that the phocograph is actually of an engine from an entirely different Chicago streetcar company. While the exact dimensions of the Corcage Grove/Hyde Park sceam dummy are not known, mformation about similar vehicles from that period suggests what the one used in Hyde Park probably was like.

Commonly, co minimize terrorizing horses along the street, these small locomotives were built within frames char resembled a shortened version of a regular horse drawn trailer. The car would have run on four wheels with probably no more than seven feet from the middle of the front wheels co the middle of the ones in the rear. Likely, it was operated by a two-cycle engine powered by steam from a vertical boiler heated by burning anthracite coal or coke to minimize smoke and soot. The engine carriage was designed ostensibly co muffle the noise of escaping steam and engine operation by means of shielding and roof top steam

condensers. It was chis latter characteristic, the ►8

\V I n ,, r I 9 9 9 '2 0 0 0

..-@ reduction of noise, as well as the horse car appearance, chat provided the underlying meaning ro the name "dummy engine," char is, silent or ''dumb," as in •·unable co speak." These small locomotives pulled no more than one or two passenger trailers along the three miles of stronger steel track installed on Cottage Grove from 39th Street to 55th Street and east to Lake Park Avenue. When nor in use, these engines and their trailers were probably scored in a car barn at 38th Street and Cottage, adjacenc to the scabies where the horses were kept. Ir is not known how many steam dummies operated on the Hyde Park

line nor how their return runs were accomplished, rhar is, by reversing gears or being turned on a platform.

Also in question is the date when steam dummies were actually introduced inro Hyde Park. Block (1977) offers the dare of 1869 for that event and cites as her source Pierce (1940). Pierce, in tutn, makes reference only to the governing legal authorizations and to Weber (1936). Weber, however, fudges on the dare by noting those 1868 actions by the Village Board permitting the building of street rails in HyJe Park but not when rhe actual construction cook place. As was earlier suggested, operating on char Cottage Grove/55th Street line in 1869 may have been a horse line rather than a steam dummy, two very different forms of power. Ac another extreme is a phocograph from a 1943 collecrion at the Chicago Hisrorical

Sociecy wich a caption stating chat a steam driven street car began running in Hyde Park in 1881. Indeed, a map dared 1881 in Bluestone (1991) clearly denotes a steam line running down Cottage Grove and turning east at 55th Street to Lake Park but this does not preclude the possibility char steam dummies were running there before 1881. Moreover, chis would have been precisely rhe time chat CCR officials were already planning to replace horse cars and steam dummies with cable cars. A more persuasive date emerges from an unpublished street transportation chronology developed in 19.33 now in the collection of the Chicago Transit Authority. le places the introduce ion of the Hyde Park steam dummy in the year 1874.

This dace seems in reasonable accord with the stare of Hyde Park's development and the known history of rhe CCR. It would also fit with the presumption that a horse car line preceded the sream dummy in time. Uncovering more substantial corroboraring information in support of any one of these dates remains a challenge.

Usually overlooked in the few references co chis sceam car is that of the almost 46 miles of Chicago City Railway Company crack existing in 1881, only those three miles of track along Cottage and 55th, the Hyde Park line, were used for steam driven streetcars. These steam dummies may have been an attempt by the CCR co compete directly with the Illinois

CHICAGO CITY RAILWAY COTTAGE GROVE LINE CABLE CAR AND TRAILERS

View is on Wabash Avenue during a summer day. The trailers were originally horse drawn cars.

During the winter, closed cars with small stoves for heat were used to carry

passengers.

Central's steam locomotives that ran along the Jake. The one-way nickel fare for a srreetcar ride was half that for a commute downtown from 55th Street on the Illinois Central but it was a much slower trip. In addition, these engines may have been considered somewhat more fitting, modern and subscancial for the prestigious community they served. Hyde Park's Trustees, recognizing the mess that accompanied horse drawn streetcars, may even have insisted on steam power. Jc was also on this portion of the line char the streets were paved with granite t0 support the heavier rails and engines required by the steam dummy. As a result, these were among the better-paved roads in the city and its suburbs.

Unfortunately, street locomotives produced a good deal more noise than advertised, frightening horses and annoying pedestrians. \'v'orse, for a variety of reasons, street car companies found that these steam dummy cars proved to be no less expensive co operate than had been the horse cars. CCR managers were spurred to look at another alternative, one being developed in California. The days of the Hyde Park steam dummy engines were numbered. The last one co run its route did so early in 1887.

THE CABLE CAR

1n the early 1870s Andrew S. Halladie, a wire manufacturer in California. developed a system wherein passenger cars ran up and down the hilly streets of downtown San Francisco on rails by means of a moving cable buried under the streets. It began operations in 1873 and its success spurred further

exp;1nsion there throughout the '70s. Chicago City Railway officers, alerted to that success, traveled co San Francisco in 1880 co study its cable system.

Realizing that if a system like that could operate on such variable terrain, it would probably work especially well upon the gentler topography of Chicago. They returned home and Charles B. Holmes, CCR's president, quickly obtained approval of the company's board and Chicago's city council co begin establishing cable car transport along many of the same Chicago streets on which they had run their horse cars.

Construction began in June, 1881 and by January, 1882, the CCR formally introduced cable cars inco Chicago's public transportation system, the second such system in the United Scates. The first trains, usually consisting of a grip car and one or two trailers, ran on the State Screet line; a second line was established on Wabash Avenue. These downtown cable cars traveled over a turnaround that went from State Srreet t0 Wabash Avenue via Lake Street and Madison Street, a layout that Hilton (1954) and others have insisted first gave the "Loop" its name not, as is often assumed, the elevated train loop which came lacer.

The Wabash/Corrage Grove horse car line was converted in 1882 to cable car use from Madison Street to 39th Street. In 1887, the Cottage Grove line was extended from 39th co 67th Street and 55th Street was converted to cable use. In 1890, after the annexation of Hyde Park, the Cottage Grove cable car system was extended south ro 71st Street, rhe ►-

-cC, south entrance to Oakwoods Cemetery anc.l dw edge of the Grand Crossing district. Cable·cars proved less expensive co run than horse or steam power, wew more acceptable to the public and apparently made money for the company. As a result, cable lines were built elsewhere in Chicago by rhe city's cwo ocher major street railway companies. Indeed, these companies eventually created the largest cable car system in the United Stares with thirty-four cable lines, 710 grip cars and 82 miles of double track and passenger traffic that peaked at 237 million riders in 1892. Moreover, the sucLessful expansion of Chicago's cable lines during the 1880s spurred the developml'nt of cable systems in most ocher large American c,cies.

Winter weather hac.l always been a chaIlenxe to Chicago's streetcars but purportedly cable cars provcJ adepc m meeting it. The sream cars may have been more effecnve than horse drawn cars during the.: wincc:r due co their weight. Cable c,irs, however, were said co be even more successful in che face of iLe and snow.

Installed at a depth of four feet below street level (a fool deeper than rhe ones in San Francisco) so thal they resisted freezing, the rnbles ran within an iron and co11Lrece enclosure with openings ar che bocrom that allowed water and snow tO escape imo a trough below ground. Travel on these cars during the winter. however, was rugged parcjcularly for Lhe conduc.ror. who srood exposed to the elements. Although there_, were wjncer enclosures insralled on the trailers and various kinds of scoves introduced co heat the cars, passengers were encouraged co wear heavy outerwear, Straw was scatcereJ on floors to insulate passenger·s feet from rhe cold floorboards. While one may have been able to make a crip on the only lightly insul.tttd grip car or che enclosed crajJers from Lake Park co downtown Chicago in perhaps sixty minutes. during Chicago·s bitter winters, the experience itself must have seemed a good deal longer for all on board. The same n<le on a horse drawn car, however, would have taken perhaps three nmes as long. For many chl· cable car was viewed as a marvelous improvement,

THE 55TH STREET CABLE CAR LINE

The driving technology of a cable car system consisted of a stationary building in which sream boilers powered iron wheels or pulleys around which ran an "t'ndless" cable installed underground along cicy srreets upon which cars moved. The Hyde Park powerhouse, consttulted io l887, was located on the north ease corner of Cottage Grove Avenue and 55th Screet, land on which The University of Chicago's Friend Family Health Care Clinic now stands. It operated both the 39th/Cottage Grove and rhe '>5th Street lines and lacer the cable co 7 I sr Street. Two Babcock and Williams' steam engines powered by three low grade coal burning boilers turned two

upright pulleys, rwency-f-tve feet io diameter. around which che cablC' flowed As the rnbles came off these vertical pulleys chey were wound around a smaller horizontal pulley d1at moved the cables under Lhe street. Tht cars that altually were in roud1 with the cable were termed grip cars because it was by means of a device managed by the conc.luLtor clue eilher grabbed ooco or released the cable. Grip the cable, the rnr moved w1rh rhe cable; release che grip and apply the brake, and the car came to a hale.

Cable cars traveled at tluee timt.:s the speed of the ol<l horse drawn cars. Since there was no gradual buil<l-ur, ro speed. every time the grip was applied nc.lers would have experienced a sharp jolc against che hard wooden seats as the grip grabbeJ onro the moving line beneath the street.

The CCR gnp Lars were four wheeled, sixteen to nineteen feet long, cen feet four inches high, wooden vehicles with seating for cwency passengers and the grip opemcor. Each grip car could pull up co three trailers. each with seating for forty passengers and a Lrain man. The signage on the 55th Sueet cable grips 1denc111ed them ;1s d1e ''Hyde Park" line. The cars followed an unusual route. From Cottage Grove. diey glided easr ac about twelve miles per h{)ur straight down 55th Street to what is now Harper Avenue.

There they began a six miles per hour counter do(kwise cm.u,t rurnrng south rn a half block pasr 56th Street where they traveled east, through what is now private housing, ro Lake Park Avenue. Turning north on Lake Park and passing what is now our headquarters, 1he cars then curved around the corner ro move wesr again on 55th Srreer co Cottage Grove. At the end of the workday. the grips and crailer would be housed .it a car barn ac 38th Street and Cottage Grove.

The Hyde Park turnaround, which ran on a separate c:1ble 3,868 feet long, was called Cable Court, a1rhough cht: name usuaJly was applied specifically to chat section between Harper and Lake Park between 56th and 57th Streets. The cable itself was moved by means of power transferred from the longer 55th street cable through speed reduction gears located un<lerground on Harper Avenue. A major reason for building che Cable Court loop was probably to allow a convenient connection for commuters with Lhe Illinois Cenrral's South Park Station which was located on the casl side of lake Park immediately north of 57ch Street. It may also have served to proteLt the cable by reducing problems in turning the grip cars. There is also a poss1bilicy char some form of chis loop may have been m existence at the rime of the steam dummy.

The Cable Court loop, ic should be emphasized, was

in place before our building was built, perhaps by as many as five or six years Various maps from l888 and 1890 clearly display the cable loop but none show the

building. Jn fact, there may have been no thought the Midway. The Hyde even given to construccjng such a huilding in thc.-- firsc -_ /4' •....46 Park/55ch Street line wa_c; place. It was only after 1890 when 1t was clear to all '. C• ••• renamed the "Jackson thal the Columbian Exposition would actually \ " • \ji o),•" Park." The extended take place in Jackson Park char plans for the ,,. , \•ti , length of the Cable building likely were begun. The · .. •: j,..;.P "' Court loop proved a building itself was almost certainly • ,,.(\. ., "\. 'p '-, • , boon in loading and

built, probably by rhe Illinois •. :zi,l_ ...,\ t.. '. "'$ unloading passengers, On Central Railroad itself, , '°\) "•jj;>"' ..... ... \ Chicago Day, October 9, during the year prior • ,'+-'" c.1-'l.(\ .:' J:: /,.,. ''.:.. 1893, the day of the Fair's highest ro rhe Pair, that is, . .(--$7... : attendance, crowds of some 500,000 1892-93, when the ' ".-- • F.r..u..M, "\ ", · people practically overwhelmed the system. embankment and • ""_.. ... • 9""t1-,.,._ Many young men, dressed in suits, their heads vjac.luccs elevating che :\\"" ' ..,:_. .,,. ropped by bowler hats, happily climbed up on the railroad's tracks wert' • - • ..,. roofs of the cable cars to make the trip co Jackson Park. being constructed. As a , ....,........ Cable cars and their associated equipment were on result there was a physical prominent display ar the World's Fair but the year

separation of the waiting 1893 also marked the moment when electricity had

rooms and ticker selling sites already been recognized as a more efficient and flexible

for lC commuters and cable car form of power for street railways. Despite appearances, passengers The great old 12th Srreec IC depor, now c:uble was on its way out. The initial introduction of demolished, was built :lt che same time anJ rhe red clectnciry to power Chicago·s streetcars in 1893 led to brick and stone used in its construction may have beeu a progrt·ssive dismantling of the cable car system that similar rn that used in building our headquarters. The finally ended in 1906. The 55th Screec/Jackson Park main point here is simply chat the cable loop was nor cable line was among the last to go having served the a result of the opening of the Fair, bur the building community for nearly twenty years. Overhead eleccnc itself was. Iines were inscaHed and the cables and gears were

Probably the most vulnerable point in the cable car removed. The cable car era ended and the era of the 5ysrem was rhe cable itself. The CCR cable LOnsisred trolley nu line began in Hyde Park. (The "trolley.. 1s of a hemp core, surrounded by 96 steel wires wound che pulley auad,cd co rhe pole chat couches and rolls into six strands of 16 wires each. The 1 1/+inch thick along the electric wire strung above the street.) Cable line, however, was subject co wear and breakage from Court kepc its name and electric streetcars and trolley use. age or accident. For example. rhe approximate lift buses followed 1ts loop well inco the present century. le of the 10,856 feet long cable line along '>'>ch Street finally was dJsmancled during the urban renewal era. was I67 days. If che grip were applied incorrectly ir rt should be noted that the emergence of each

could slice or dangerously damage rhe cable. When a succeeJmg street rail technology did not immediately major problem developed 111 one segment of the cable, preclude the existence of the ones preceding. By 1892. the entire system of which ic was a part ground co an for insrnnce, rhe year before the Fair, the CCR had abrupt hair while repairs were made. Cables were fixed 2,6 J l horses, almost double rhe number it had in

by splices made on site or replaced entirely by splH.:inµ 1!'{80. Only one-third of the CCR revenues, however,

a new line into the existing line, running it was derived from rhe horse car lines, the remajoder completely through the encire sysrem and then com mg largely from its cable operations. Electric splicing together rhe rwo ends of the new line. lines, as well, were just being introduced. By 1895,

The impact of the cable car line on rhe economy of Chicago's srreecs, particularly in the downtown area, Hyde Park was immediate. The Emnnmist (Chicago) for were filled with a melange of streetcars, some powered December 8, 1888 reported: 'The development for by horses, others by cables, anJ still ochers by business purposes of Fifty-Fifth Srreer...has been eleccricicy. Steam also powered rrains on che suburban largely due to the cable car line... The prices for commuter lines and, forseveral years during the mid- property on Fifty-Fifth have risen from $50 to $100 a 1890s, the city's elevated rail lines. This mixture was foot, and over twenty scores are in process of ereu1on finally resolved in favor of elecrricicy as rhe

on the treec." The street's commercial past was set for predominant power source for streetcars by 1906 and the next sixcy-five years. rhe Illinois Central commuter line, by 1926.

During the World·s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Horses, rn()reover, remained a factor on Chicago s cable cars were a major source of transportario11 for streets. There were an estimated 120,000 horses in millions of visitors. Cable cars offered close acLess ro Chicago in 1895. Though fading rapidly from use

the Fair's entrances at 57th Street and, on Cottage, at after che turn of rhe century as power for city ►@

-<8 screercars and fire engines, rhey remained important in the cicy's private transportation system well imo the present century for recreational use and for hauling delivery wagons. Some of our readers may sci11 remember the horse drawn wagons io Hyde Park that delivered ice an<l fresh vegetables ro peopl,:-'s homes. A pa1nnng at our headquarter!> purcr,tys an olJ horse drawn milk wagon char once operated in Hyde Park. The wa on srood aban<loned for many years east of the IC cracks at 57th Strt'et

IN CLOSING

While the street cable car today is ofrtn Vll·wcd merely as a quainc relic of che past, the scuff of charm bracelets, roys, .1dvcrcising gimmicks and assorted other memorabilia usually associated with San Francisco, it has a quire legitimate and nocablC' role in American, Chicago and, certainly, Hyde Park history The story of the cable car in Chicago is mosr obviously r,ed ro rhe evolution of public transportation and re,;i<lential. industrial and commercial developmellt in che city, in general, and co Hyde Park and its nearby suburban neighbors, in particular, both before ao<l after annexation. Moreover, it provided che publit access to che South Park system and may wtll havt been a factor in establishing some of its boundaries. In essence, the horse drawn and lacer the cable car performed the same function for these areas chat the Illinois Central Railroad commuter line had played 101t1ally in che emergence of Hyde Park rndetd, together the rwo spurred rhe growth of Hyde Park

and the South Side generally throughout char ccnrur) and beyond.

Chicago has often been referred co as a ciry or neighborhoods. In earlier periods in Chicago's history. one of the things chat helped define chose neighborhoods was the srreeccar lines. The unincenJed effect, however, was, ro a certain degree, rheir influence on the emergence and reinforcement of arrificial social, ethnic and racial boundaries. The "ocher" side of the tracks was given a new, big city twist that could evoke social conflict, at times biner or even violent. On the other hand, the elaborac1u11 of the public transportation system opened up co Chicagoans new opporrunines not only for better physical mobility but also for enhanced residential, investment, employment and recreational cho1Ces as well.

The extension of public street and rad transportation 10 and around Hyde Park had an 1mpacr on che question of the annexation of I lyde Park co Chicago. lt had the effect of drawrng HyJe Park and its population closer to Chicago, both u1 a temporal and economic sense, while at the same time enabling the emergence of multiple cencers of political, social and economic interests outside of

l Tyde Park Cenn-r. Each new line escablished, each 11ew st•t of tracks laid, was yet another direct link bNween the city ,tnd villagers of Greater Hyde Park.

The pol icical power char had been wielded by the pionet·rs in I ly<le Park Center (who opposed annex,mon) was diluted in the face of population 111ueases an<l tht' emergenLe of new and powerful c1.:011om1c and political interests elsewhere in the suburb. As a result, annexanon proponents would cli11m rhat the old style of governancl' was outmoded Jnd simply inadequate co the new situation. One mny

:1150 specul:He thar the concencmrion of more advanceJ

street transport in the norrhern section of Hyde Park contributed co a sense of deprivanon expressed by citizens in the southern portions of the villa e It , no surprise rhac when rhe annexHcion question wus puc to 1 hr vucers of Hyde Park Village in 1887 and 1889, che voting m,tjoricy that decided the issue ,n favor ot annexanon came largely from the wards outside the olJ center of Hyde Park.

The cable car waiting room on Lake Park apparently directly served the rransit system for less than a decade. perhaps as few as five years, if our t:orrespondems' dace for irs conversion into .i lunch room, 1898, 1s correcc. The months of the Fair, then, would have been the peak period of its connections to chc· e;1hle cars. ln ihac sense, the building is a genume

.imlact of both the Columbian Exposition and uf the Cable Car er-a.

The building was located ne.lr che Illinois Cencral scops at 55ch and 57th Streets, the Cable Court strt""etcars ::inJ the hotels and small shops along Lake Park and 55th and 57th Sm:ecs. all of whi<.h generated considerable sidewalk traffic. This location provided the logic for its more than half-century or existence :ls a lunch room. Jr became a working man's cafe thar serveJ large portions ro customers at a reasonable price. The demise of rhe building's use as a lunch

room probably was as much a function of residential

,rnd commercwl changes occurring in Hyde Park as ,r

was sheer obsolescence of the facility as an eatery. Ownership of rhe building remained with the Illinois Cemrnl R,1ilroad until 1c w sold ro our Society 1n 1977.

There is snmcch111g wonderfully resonant, perhaps even iron1c, that chis working mao·s building has become rhe home of an historical society for a rnmmu11icy driven by issues and conn sets generace<l boch by elitist aspirations and social diversity. This s:ime transaction, however, has practical consequences m the present as our Society seeks to respond t.ffectively to the realicy and complexity of our community's history.

Finally, assembly lines were offshoots of cable car cethnology as are ski lifts. A less obvsous connection can be drawn bl'tween cable cars and another then-

\\' I n •• r I !J 'l •

Although cable driven street cars disappeared as a major urban transportation system, the related technology embodied by the elevator continued to power and be shaped by the emergence of new techniques for the construction of taller buildings for offices, commerce and residential living. The skyscraper, in general, and, particularly in Hyde Park, the large apartment hotel, were two of its resulrs... bur that is anocher story. CD

Sten Treffmrm is011r Society's archivist and 1s preparmJ!. cmothttr exhibition 011 Hyde Park's hotels for display at a/Ir headquarters later this year.

Thank..r lo the staff /mm the Chirago Transit A11thonty /m itsassistance.

Selected Sources:

Jean Block, Hyde Park Homes, (Chicago, 1977). Daniel

M. Bluestone, Cons/meting Chicago, (New Haven, 1991). George W. Hilcon, "Cable Railways of Chicago," 8111/etin Nll111ber JO, (Chjcago: Electric Railway Hiscorical Society, 1954). George W. Hilton, The Cablt Car in Amtrica, (San Diego, 1982). James D. Johnson, A Cent11ry o/ChicaioStreetcars. 1858-1958, (Wheacon, Illinois, 1964). Alan R. Lind, Chicago Smface Lines: A1111/mtrated History, 3rd edition, (Park Forest, Illinois, 1986). Milo Roy Maltbie, ed. The Street Railrmys of Chicago, (Chicago, 1901). John A. Miller, Fam Plea.re/, (New York, 1941). Samuel W. Norton, Chit-ago Trattion: A History Legislative and Political, (Chicago, I 907). Bessie Louise Pierce, A History {)/Chicago, Vol. 2, (New York, 1940). Frank Rowsome, Jr., Trolley Ca,,Treasury, (New York, 1956). Harry Perkins Weber, comp., 011tline History of Chicago Trartion,(Chicago,1936).John H. White.Jr., "Steam in the Streets: The Grice and Long Dummy," Technology and C1dt! re Vol. 27 (1986), pp. 106-9. John

S. Wnght, Chirago: Past. Present. F11t11re, (Chicago: Board of Trade: J868, Second edition, 1870).

LUNCH ROOM AT

5529 S. LAKE PARK AVE. C.1935

From Keller Family Collection

Letter to the Editor

To Whom It May Concern:

ln 1898, our grandfather, Turney Keller, opened the "Lunchroom" at 5529 Lake Avenue, which is now the Hyde Park Historical Society. (Ed. note: Lake Avenue was renamed Lake Park Avenue on April l4, 1913.) With the help of his two sons, Hosey (Harvey) and Charles Keller, the restaurant was continuously in operation until 1952. (Ed. note: One of the interviewees for the earlier articles thought chat che restaurant had changed hands in 1948.)

Our grandfather with the help of his sons, leased the bujlding for the entire time. We have no idea how much money was involved. He did have an accident on a trolley losing one arm, nor cwo legs. (Ed. noce: One of our correspondents in our earlier article had speculated that the IC had leased the building to Mr. Keller at no cost because he had lose two legs in a railroad accidcnr.)

Before 1898, the building was used as a warming house for trolley personnel. The men gathered around the old pot belly scove and, we're sure, cold some great scories. The notion that some food could be served came co our grandfather in 1898.

When our grandfather died in 1922, the boys, known as the Keller Brothers, cook over the

"Lunchroom." Their wives, Louetta and Marsha, also worked in the restaurant.

At the crack of dawn, breakfast was served. We can still remember the many aromas of home cooking.

Bacon and eggs and oatmeal in the morning and if you looked at the wall one couJd see the specials for lunch, such as vegetable soup and meat loaf. There were no printed menus. The clientele was an integrated mixrure of working males in Hyde Park. The counter was in two sections seating about twelve.

Our families spenr many long hours making the "Lunchroom·· very successful The information above is correct according to documented papers from this time period. We have included various pictures for a visual remembrance of che times.

Sincerely,

Mary Bell Keller Johnson and Judy Keller Levantino

Ms.Johnson, rhe daughter of Hartley Keller. in a phone interview. told 11s that the lunch room u1as do.red evmin11.s and on S11ndays. She herself was born ctt her family's rmdence nn the 54th block of Harper Avenue. T11rney's family IMS Christian Scientist and probably was a wembe,· of the 10th Church of Chrirt Scientist al 57th and B!acksto,ze, ,wu• the vacant St. Stephen's Church. Ms, Levantino. her comin. is the daughter of Charles Keller-. -S.A.T.

I()

PROPRIETORS OF THE "LUNCH ROOM" AT 5529 S. LAKE PARK AVENUE

Postcard view c.1915 from the Keller family collection.

I !I !) 2 0 0 0

We Remember Jim Stronks --.

JiSmtronks was one of the Society's most generous h1stonan-wr,ters. His contributions to Hyde Park History were outstand,ng-articles deal,ng with subjects as diverse as Shipwrecks off Hyde Park and Alonzo Stagg-as well as those mentioned below. It was Jim who suggested the name Hyde Park History for our publication. "That's what it's about." he said. The remembrance below was written by his long time friend and colleague Mary Sidney.

James B. Stronks died on September 4, 1999 in Iowa City. He had moved from Chicago to his hometown after learning he had leukemia. Readers of the Society's Newsletter Wtll recall Jim as the author of lively, probmgly researched arttcles about little known corners of Hyde Park/Chicago history: the building where William Jennings Bryan made his "Cross of Gold" speech, the Hyde Park Hotel where widowed Mary Ltncoln spent a sad summer, and Camp Douglas where sick and dyingConfederate soldiers were imprisoned. Jim loved f1Istory, especially of 19tl1century America, Absorbed In research, he was perhaps happiest studying old books, old letters, old maps, old newspapers, diaries, deeds, and wills, whatever. He had a microscopic knowledge of the Civil War

Completing a PhD at the University of Chicago after Army service in World War II, Jim was for many years professor of American Literature at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of many articles and reviews.

But he was also: a Hyde Parker, runner ( in the 70s and

80s), hiker in the Alps and Yorkshire moors and elsewhere, biker tn France and Italy, a museum and gallery patron,

Notes From the Archives

Om· ,1pprt't1ation to th followinJ!.friends for th ir g1jl1

r11 the Archn1c'J:

• Nicholas Fulop, Quadranile Clllb tlin:<.tor, for hi1, gift of a copy of Emily Kadens. Thi· Q11t1dranglt' Ch,b. 18,9-1993: Cn'tltmg a St!nfr of Snc.i,•ty (The Club: 1998).

• Herbert Kalk, for rhirty-one original poscerc; udverristng rhe 11y<le Park/57 rh Street Art Fa1r (al I were on display at uur headquarcers in 1997 durin thefair's fifrielh anniversary year celebration).

• Tom Pavelec, for his assistance in secunng rhe above donation.

• Berenice Boehm, for her <lunation of che book S11111,enir of the World:r Co/11111/Jiafl Exposition (Chicago. 1893).

• Leon and Marian Despres, for rweory-flve Hyde Park related books. one a 1923 direcrory for much of the dry and ics suburbs listing che names of residenr:. their addresses, and the cars they drove.

• Gayle Janowit.t, for two urban rent'.wal rc:laceJ

CSO subscriber, movie goer. and dog enthusiast, faithfully attending the annual April kennel club show and the Run with Rover race in Lincoln Park.

He was a formidable teacher! Much praised and admired by serious students, feared and disliked by the lazy. Every minute was accounted for In his classrooms-no idle chitchat, no dead time-every student paper was painstakingly corrected or commented upon; not an error

escaped. His office at UIC was a wonder itself, almost painfully neat. not one book or well sharpened pencil out of place. And Jim htmself: tall slender, upright, suit pressed.

tie straight. shoes gleaming, spectacles shining, and on

good days. blue eyes alive with a bit of whimsy or mischief.

Always busy tn the retirement home in Iowa City, he led a film series, as a lark Joined the Lions Club, biked into the Iowa countryside. became a bird watcher in spite of himself, poked about in small towns and country graveyards taking photographs, made friends with local dogs, and was always on the prowl for an interesting bit of overlooked history.

He was also a witty man, fond of (usually) amiable irony and satire. He'd call a friend long distance to share jokes he'd heard. True, l1e had eccentricities: he steadfastly opposed alleged improvements like answering machines, computers, and e-mail; until 1998 he typed all articles and correspondence on a beloved elderly upright manual Underwood until he could no longer buy parts for it.

We are ve,y grateful to Mary Sidney for her thoughtful and evocative picture of Jim. We do deeply regret his early death and miss h,s generous participation in the Society's endeavors.

maps, among orher smaJler items.

• Sidney WiJliams. Jr., for. among other icems, two t.ha1rs from Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway G:uJens chat once stood ttt 60th and Cottage Grove and a remarkable old me<l,c:ine botrle from a ph.irmacv once lut.attd ac 57th Scn ec and Lake Park

• Harold Wolff, for a major gift of some three hundred

anJ cweni:y-ftve Hyde Park related books, magazines und 1mtebooks of articles that he collected over a period of rwenry-five years. His generosity has filled major gaps 10 our rnl lettion and expanded it dramat1cally

• Beth \'{!ood, for a phorocopy of White City Mai,,zme, Vol.2. No. I (May, 1906) which prov1Jes an l"arly look at one of che great Chicago amusemenr parks chat once scooJ at 63rd and Cotcage Grove.

Wt' al.so have rete1ved from Katherine Erickson tht well-used passport of Ida de Penoer who died ac che end of 1998 at the age of 102. Ida moved out of towu co live near relanves last summer bur before she left Ch,rngo she rook pains co inform the Society of her new mailing address. She was a very loyal supporter of our work and she will be missed.

\\' I II I , ,, I ,, I I IJ '> 0 ll fl

JnUJAV )fllldJ)fl?l·s 62'.

h.lJ!X>S f1D!JOlS >fied JPAH

The Society is delighted to present this wonderf11l description of the Life and Death of Chicago's great Ferris Wheel of 1893. It was written by Patrick Meehan in 1964 while he was a 4th year Mechanical Engineering student at the University of British Columbia. His paper was p11blished at that time in The UBC Engineer and was discovered for 11s by 011r late member and insightf1tl writer, Jim Stronks.

We have recently tracked down Mr. Meehan who writes from Vancouver:

''I had written the article as much to draw attention to the existence of engineering history as to fulfill a course requirement, and since I had been the Editor of the The UBC Engineer the previous year, I had arranged that it

would be published... What may interest you is the original of the profile and elevation of the Wheel; I drew that from scratch to scale-note the six foot man beside the tower leg!"

BY PATRICK MEEHAN

In 1890, the U.S. Congress decided that the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America should be centered in Chicago, and accordingly, on April 9, the State of Illinois licensed the corporation known as the World's Columbian Exposition to prepare this great event.

The Corporation's directors, in October, 1890, appointed the rising architect, Daniel H. Burnham, Construction Chief, and delegated to him autocratic ► 8

-<O powers. Burnham, architect of the first "skyscrapers", was a good bet to score a smashing success, both for the Exposition and for himself. At this early stage, he was chiefly concerned at the lack of participation by America's civil engineers.

Seeking to stir them into action, he arranged to speak before rhe "Saturday Afternoon Club," an informal group of architects and engineers who were interested in the Fair. Their gatherings had served as a sort of public opinion poll on many of the architectural and engineering structures of the Exposition.

Burnham's speech was cleverly contrived to produce immediate reaction: he asserted that the architects of America had covered themselves with glory and enduring fame by their artistic skill and

original designs for mammoth building , while the civil engineers had contributed very little or nothing in the way of originating novel features or of demonstrating the possibilities of modern engineering practices in America. He called on chem to provide some distinctive feature, something to fill

the relative position in the World's Columbian Exposition that was filled by the 984 foot Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition in 1889. It was immediately proposed to build a tower 500 feet higher than

Eiffel's, but since this would be playing second fiddle to

Eiffel's genius, this idea was dismissed. Mere bigness was not what was wanted.

Something novel, original, daring and unique must be designed and built if American engineers were to retain their prestige and standing.

Seated in the audience was a tall,

slight young engineer with a pale, resolute face. This was George Washington Gale Ferris, at chat time the senior partner in a firm specializing in building steel bridges. Thirty-two years old, he had been educated at the California Military Academy and Rensseler Polytechnic Institute, where he received an engineering degree in 1881. For several years, he had worked on railroads and mining ventures and was one of the first to make a profession of testing materials and structures.

The popular story is chat Ferris designed the wheel

while at dinner with friends in a Chicago restaurant and char it was built without a change being made to this original sketch. There is some evidence, however, chat he had designed the Wheel five or six years prior co the Exposition and it is possible that he chose a quiet moment after dinner to reveal these plans.

Ferris decided chat chis was the proper rime and the opportunity he had been looking for co build his Great Wheel and he at once set about this monumental cask.

I. Getting the Concession

Designing the Wheel was no easy task, even for experienced engineers. Stresses for such a structure had never been determined ... so the theory of design had to be derived from first principles. Difficulties were also met in obtaining financing ... for in 1892, the country was in the midst of a severe depression ... but Ferris's quiet yet enthusiastic manner inspired confidence and the Ferris Wheel Company was eventually capitalized at $600,000.

Armed with completed plans and guaranteed financing, Ferris approached the Columbian

Exposition's Ways and Means Committee in the spring of 1892. His ideas were treated as chose of a lunatic... and he became known

as "The Man with Wheels in his Head." The engineers and architects of the Saturday Afternoon Club believed he was making a

fool of himself as they loudly proclaimed that his wheel could not be built or, if it could, it

could not be operated. But Ferris persisted and after much effort, the Committee granted him

a concession co build the Wheel, not in Jackson Park, the main grounds, but

in Central Avenue on the Midway. By the terms of chis concession, granted December 16, 1892,

The Ferris Wheel Company was to retain $300,000 received from the sale of tickers, after which one-half of the gross receipts were to be

paid co the Exposition.

II. Building the Wheel

By the time the concession was granted it was mid winter-only four months until the opening of the Exposition. Since no single shop could begin co do all the work, contracts were let to several different firms, each chosen for its ability co do the particular job entrusted to it. Great precision was required as few of the parts could be assembled until they were on site. Ferris called on Luther Rice, also only thirty-two ( as was Ferris) and only three years out of Engineering School, co become Construction Chief of the project. The foundation work was proceeding slowly in the face of the most severe winter that Chicago had experienced in many years. The frost at the Wheel site was three feet deep and was underlain by twenty feet of saturated sand, which could, when disturbed by construction activities or vibration, suddenly behave

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like the proverbial quicksand. Pumps were kept running day and night...live steam was piped in co thaw the frozen sand and later to keep the concrete from freezing before it had set. Piles were driven a further 32 feet... to hardpan and upon steel beams resting on these piles were placed the eight monolithic reinforced concrete and masonry piers -20 by 20 by 35 feet-which were to support the towers which in turn would support the axle.

On March 18, 1893, the 89,320 pound axle, forged in Pittsburgh by the Bethlehem Iron Company, arrived in Chicago... the largest hollow forging in the

worlJ at the time, it was 45 1/2 feet long, 33 inches in diameter... Four and one-half feet from each end it carried two 16 foot diameter case-iron spiders weighing 53,031 pounds. On March 20, placing of

the first cower post was completed ... shorcly after came the problem of raising the axle. In 'an amazingly short two hours, the immense axle assembly was hoisted co the top of the 140 feet high towers and placed neatly in its sturdy pillow blocks.

Next came the assembly of the actual wheel-a very involved process. Meanwhile, the power plant was being constructed over 700 feet away and completely outside the grounds. Ten inch steam pipes fed two 1000 hp reversible engines-one to be used for driving the wheel and the second being held in readiness as an emergency reserve. A Westinghouse air brake was used to control the Wheel and to hold it motionless when desired.

The Columbian Exposition opened on May 1, 1893, while the steelworkers barely paused co watch, high on the growing Wheel. By June 9, the Wheel, as yet without cars, was ready for a trial run. At six o'clock in the evening with trusted men stationed at various

points, Rice ordered the steam turned on. Slowly, without a creak or groan and only the soft clink of the chain, the great wheel began to turn ... in twenty minures, it had completed one revolution. When he got the word, Ferris, who was in Pittsburgh at the time, immediately ordered the 36 cars hung.

Visitors and participants at the Exposition had viewed the Wheel as an enigma, but the sight of it moving slowly on chat summer evening galvanized chem into action ... from all sides crowds formed, shouting , gesturing... On June 10, one car was hung; by June 13, cwen ty more had been added and the offices and loading platforms practically completed.

The cars were 24 feet long, 13 feet wide, and 10 feet high, and weighed 26,000 pounds. Each car carried fancy twisted wire chairs for 38 of the 60 passengers. The five large plate glass windows on each side were fi cced wi ch heavy screens and the doors at each end were provided with secure locks...fire fighting equipment was carried as a safeguard ...Six platforms were arranged to speed loading and unloading, with a guard at each co signal the operator when his car was filled and locked. Conductors rode in each car co answer patrons' questions or, if necessary, co calm their fears.

On June 11, with six cars hung, Daniel Burnham arrived co cake a trial trip and Margaret Ferris, who had often given words of encouragement co workers on the Wheel, also went along-the Wheel's first woman passenger. At six o'clock on June 13, Rice held a trial trip for the local press who were very enthusiastic in their praise... correspondents, particularly those from foreign countries, began making repeated requests for drawings and data, but Ferris appears to have been very

reticent about releasing details. As a consequence, ►G)

Axle of Ferris Wheel-note 6 foot man beside tower leg.

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..:@) no copies of the original plans or calculations have survived.

III. The Grand Opening and Successful Run

June 21st dawned clear and bright, and for a little while, it seemed to the men who had labored so tirelessly, that the sun rising over Lake Michigan was rotating around the axle of their Wheel. Important invesrors and various dignitaries dressed in their Sunday best, were gathered about. On the speakers' platform were the officers of the company and other important persons. The last speaker was Ferris. In this moment of triumph, his happily framed speech drew attention to the fact that he "had gotten the wheels out of his head and made them a living reality." The final success he attributed to his wife, Margaret, who had encouraged and comforted him in the ost difficult times. In conclusion, he dedicated his work to the engineers of America. Mrs. Ferris handed him a golden whistle which he blew as the signal to start up the Wheel. The Iowa State Band struck up "America" and to the cheers of the assembled thousands, the Great Wheel slowly and majestically revolved, towering above them in its magnificence.

The Wheel was opened to the public and ran without

the slightest difficulty until November 6, 1893. A trip consisted of one revolution, during which six stops were made for loading, followed by one nine-minute, non stop revolution.

On a clear day, patrons could not only see the Fairgrounds and City, but miles out onto the lake and the surrounding states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan. Attendance on dark smoky days was nearly as heavy as on good days, so it seems the Wheel itself was more of an attraction than the unprecedenterl view it offered. 3000 of Edison's new incandescent light bulbs were mounted on the Wheel and made it a dazzling sight as they blinked on and off.

Of course, it attracted sensationalists, such as several couples who wished to be married in the highest car. Two couples went so far as to have their invitations printed, inviting their friends to see them married on the Ferris Wheel, but since the Company was not seeking notoriety, they were forced to be content with a ceremony performed in the Company's offices.

False stories appeared in the newspapers too, such as that of the pug dog leaping to his death through an open window or the story that the Wheel was stopped for some hours with a number of people in the upper cars. The wheel experienced four months of trouble-free operation, accompanied only by the clink of the driving chain and an occasional exuberant whistle blast from the engine crew.

The Wheel weighed 2,079,884 pounds and when carrying the maximum live load of 2,160 passengers weighing, say, 140 pounds each, the total weight in

Entrance to the cars (promotional booklet, 1893)

motion would have been 2,382,244 pounds or 1,191 tons. The capacity of the Wheel was never taxed, even on Chicago Day, when there were 34,433 paid admissions... The supper hour was heaviest during the summer months but in the fall, as many people were carried in the early morning as in the late afternoon.

By November 6th, 1,453,611 paid admissions had been received with possibly a thousand or more free trips having been given to various important people. The gross earnings were $726,805, of which $513,403 was retained by the company, giving them a profit of

$395,000.

IV. The Ferris Wheel Park Fiasco

Though the Exposition closed on November 1, 1893, the Wheel stood idle on the Midway until April 29, 1894, when a new site was found. It took 86 days and cost $14,833 to dismantle it. In July, 1895, re-erection was begun and the Wheel was ready for service by October. The new site, adjacent to Lincoln Park, was only 20 minutes from the city's principal hotels and railway stations and the Directors sold bonds hoping to landscape the grounds, build a restaurant, a band shell, a Vaudeville theater, to paint the Wheel and Cars... It is doubtful if many of these improvements were made...

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the company began to lose money rapidly, as patrons failed to materialize.

Shortly after the bonds were placed on sale, George Washington Gale Ferris, age 37 years, died of tuberculosis on November 22, 1896.

On June 3, 1903, the Chicago Trib11ne reported:

FERRIS WHEEL LIVES ANEW

Though sold as junk it will revolve again

Brings $1800 at receiver's sale. Attorney H. M. Seligman representing buyers of Old Truck, being the successful bidder.

Debts of $400,000 outstanding

There is an opening in Chicago for a bright young executioner who will undertake to put the Ferris Wheel out of existence and dispose of the remains. Experience in the destruction of cars is considered requisite.

For yesterday the Ferris wheel turned up with a new life-the ninth and last, it is declared, though this is by no means certain. The wheel passed under the hammer for $1800, and thereby sank into the category of junk.

Once the incarnation of a wondrous feat of engineering, the old World's Fair relic now seems to be inevitably approaching the final dissolution which has threatened it periodically for ten years... A wrecking company has agreed to remove the structure. Immediately? 0 not they-in five months. Sentimental persons who would drop a tear for the passing of the wheel, and other citizens who have procrastinated the adventure of a run about its axle may take heart. It is understood that rural excursionists in search of thrills may still be accommodated if they can guarantee 30 cents in receipts and wait for the engineer to get up steam.

The auction was a touching scene, marked with the usual reminiscences of past glory. The chief mourner appeared in the person of Receiver Rice. The judge called for a bid from anyone present. .. a representative of the Chicago House Wrecking Company, after glancing all about, offered $800, bidding in cautious tones as if awed by his own temerity.

There was another long silence and then a voice: "I'll bid $1800. "It was Attorney H. M. Seligman, representing a junk firm... and the judge declared the wheel "going, going, once, twice-gone, and sold to the gentleman on the right."

Receiver Rice drew a long face and exclaimed: "It's a shame, a terrible shame! Why, that engine alone is worth $10,000, and the boilers $7000,

and then there are 2000 pounds of steel."

"Yes, but just think! It's going to cost us

$30,000 to take the wheel down." replied Seligman.

"What will we do with all that $1800?" exclaimed Receiver Rice, whose grief was melting away in the humor of the situation.

"Well, I'll tell you, " responded Attorney Seligman. "I'll call a stockholders' meeting, apply the sum on the indebtedness and declare a dividend." Then the party filed out of the courtroom with Mr. Seligman in the lead.

V. The Last Days

Some months after the sale, crews of workmen began dismantling the Wheel for shipment to St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Ninety five men spent 72 days building the falsework towers and taking down the wheel ...by July, 1904, the Wheel was in operation in St. Louis.

Nothing is known about the profits made during the Exposition, but it is probable they were not as great as they were expected to be. The company's failure to remove the Wheel after the close of the fair brought complaints from many who considered it to be an eyesore. Again in neglect, the Wheel's end came on the morning of May 11, 1906.

From the Chicago Tribune:

FERRIS WHEEL IS BLOWN UP

Blown to pieces by a monster charge of dynamite, the Ferris wheel came to an ignominious end yesterday at St. Louis, after a varied career of thirteen years. At its ending it was unwept and unsung. The Wheel first was a treasure of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Then for a long period of monumental and unprofitable inactivity, it towered in an amusement park at North Clark Street and Wrightwood Avenue. It finally was removed to St. Louis to form for the second time the huge mechanical marvel of a great exposition.

The old wheel, which had become St. Louis' white elephant died hard. It required 200 pounds of dynamite to put it out of business. The first charge ... wrecked its foundation and the wheel dropped to the ground ... as it settled it slowly turned, and then, after tottering a moment like a huge giant in distress, it collapsed slowly. It did not fall to one side, as the wreckers had planned... it merely crumpled up slowly. Within a few minutes it was a tangled mass of steel and iron thirty or forty feet high.

The huge axle, weighing 45 tons, dropped slowly with the remnants of the wheel, crushing►@

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View from the wheel-from Applehaum's Chicago World's Fair, 1893 (Dover)

« the smaller braces and steel framework. When the mass stopped settling it bore no resemblance to the wheel which was so familiar to Chicago and St. Louis and to 2,500,000 amusement seekers from all over the world, who, in the days when it was in operation, made the trip to the top of its height of 264 feet and then slowly around and down to the starting point.

Fol lowing the blast that wrecked the wheel, but which failed to shatter its foundations, came another charge of 100 pounds of dynamite. The sticks were sunk in holes drilled in the concrete foundations that supported the pillars in the north side of the wheel.

The wheel was the wonder of two continents by reason of its cost, its dimensions, and its utter uselessness. It was the rival of the Eiffel Tower of Paris. Chicago was glad to get rid of it and St. Louis is said to have witnessed its destruction with satisfaction.

Ferris and his great wheel were gone but he had left, as a legacy to generations of entertainment-seekers, the World's Greatest Ride. C:.

TH IS MONTH, THE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SERVICE ADMINISTRATION WILL OPEN A SUMMER LONG EXHIBIT OF PHOTOGRAPHS ILLUSTRATING THE HISTORY OF THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE. INCLUDED IN THE EXHIBIT WILL BE SEVERAL PRINTS FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

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Paul Cornell Awards 2000

Presented by Bert Benade at the Society's Annual Meeting last February, awards went to:

The Hyde Park Neighborhood Club for its commitment, since 1909, to the social fabric of our community. Accepting: Colleen O'Leary, President, and Alison Alexander, Director

Gwendolyn Brooks Poet Laureate of Illinois, who gives voice and perspective to the story of the African-American community, so important to the history of Chicago's South Side and to Hyde Park.

Harold Wolff for his gift to the society of a large and broad ranging collection of books and documents relating to our community

Stephanie and George Franklin for their success in bringing Nichols Park into existence and for keeping it viable through their oversight, ongoing community programs and joyous Fourth of July activities.

s )) I' lng 2000

Lf 909 1I 'O BJ!l!:)

;mu;}AV )jlBd d:>fB'I -s 6c

Al;}!::>OS flD!lOlS!H )(lBd ;}PAH

HPHS supports the preservation of International House. For information: www.saveihouse.org or call 773.753.2270

Looking Back to Beginnings. ■ ■

An address given on the 50th Anniversary of the founding of Hyde Park Presbyterian Ch1trch

By Mrs. J. F. Gilchrist - May, 1910

Long years have flown since first we met In the old church that stood in the shade.

Gray hairs have come, but we'll ne'er forget The good old times when we sang and prayed... No stained windows reflected the light

Nor was ptJlpit in velvet arrayed;

Yet every heart was cheerful and light, In the old church that stood in the shade.

his hardly reads like a description of the Hyde Park Presbyterian church, yet the above lines were written many years ago by a former superintendent of the Sabbath School, Mr. James P. Root. The old church stood in a grove of oak trees at the corner of Oak Street and Hyde Park Avenue. It was a quaint little building with a V-shaped roof. The double doors opened upon a center aisle flanked on either side by hard wooden benches. Halfway down on one side was a short bench seating but two, the organist and choirmaster, and in the space thus made were the little melodeon and the big wood stove that

smoked sadly when the wind blew from the ease.

At first, all denominations worshipped together, but as they grew in numbers they divided, the Presbyterians meeting in the morning and the Episcopalians in the afternoon. One cold winter day, tradition states, the Episcopal congregation had to return to their homes, as the Presbyterians had burned all the Episcopal wood, and there was a famous mock trial in Flood's Hall, where the prisoner was brought

in dragging a great log to which he was chained.

The churchyard was enclosed with a picket fence, and from the gate a two-plank walk led to the front door. When the building was dedicated the gate posts were decorated with great wreaths of beautiful wild flowers and the pulpit was banked with many lovely blossoms gathered from nearby woods and fields. The lot was donated and the chapel built in 1858 by Mr. Paul Cornell, the "Father of Hyde Park," and on May 6, 1860, the First Presbyterian church of Hyde Park was organized with sixteen members. In eight years the congregation outgrew the chapel, so another location was secured at the corner of Adams Avenue and Oak Street and 53rd street. Worship was held in that chapel for the last time on April 3, 1870. As our poet regretfully remarks,

They moved it away and cut down the grove, Not a bird nor a prayer has stayed;

Nothing to mark the spot we love,

\'(!here the old ch11rch stood in the shade

As a matter of fact, the church was only moved around the corner of the lot and faced on Hyde Park ►@

-<O Avenue instead of Oak Street. It became the Town Hall, and a strong basement was built underneath to accommodate prisoners. The Hyde Park jail still occupies that spot. The old building was moved to 79th Place and Madison Avenue in 1892, where it was used as a hotel during the World's Fair. It has since been burned. As a church, a jail and a World's Fair Boarding house, it has been quite a factor in the discipline of the world!

Once upon a time there was a little girl whose earliest recollections of life began on Hyde Park Avenue-long since renamed Lake Avenue. Oak Street became 53rd Street, and Adams became Washington Avenue. Then there were

beautiful flowers in the gardens and roses clambered over the front porches. Just outside her backyard was a terrible monster that went to and from the city of Chicago four times a day. Every time she heard the engine coming she would scamper into the house because she was sure that if it ever got off the track, it would come right into her yard.

On the other side of the Illinois Central right-of-way were the great big woods, so dense that she knew that bears and wolves were there. Her neighbors were Mr. Hinkley, Dr. Flood, the Campbells and Major Cole, the Hibbards and the Bogues. Major Cole was an evangelist and in the estimation of this little girl he was more important than the Apostle Paul.

She started school at the old

touch the sky and the bell that pealed was given to the church by Pastor Johnson's father. At the very tip of the top was a great golden cross that glistened in the sunshine; altogether it was a most marvelous steeple.

One Saturday afternoon the little girl was looking out of the window watching a dreadful storm. Even as she looked there was a whirling black cloud over the church and the steeple bent, described a semi-circle in the air, and crashed ro the ground, a splintered ruin. It was rebuilt, but not so high!

After the morning service came Sabbath School where the infant class was led by Mrs. James P. Root and Mrs. Fasset. Mrs. Root was one of the most

efficient women of the early church and Mrs. Fasset was an artist of no mean ability. A large painting of hers adorns one of the walls in the capitol in Washington. Every Sabbath afternoon the little girl went with her father to Pastor Johnson's house, where he hitched up the Pasror's horses. He needed a horse in those days as the parish was wide and houses were scattered from the city limits at 39th Street south to 67th Street. Streets were unlighted and unpaved.

South Park was called Woodville. To the West was Egandale, where the dogtooth violets grew in abundance and where boys searched for bird's nests. Then came the pine woods, the only place to find the yellow violet. Across the dummy track on 55th Street was Gansell's prairie, the home of the dainty white

Seminary building on Hyde Park Avenue opposite the jail,

Old Stone Church 1869-1889

violet, where boys played ball in summer and children

ant it was a fearful and fascinating thing for the scholars to run over and peek in the windows to see who was locked up. Her teacher was Mrs. Parsons who taught first grade in Hyde Park schools for forty years. Every Sabbath morning the little girl went with her father and mother to the "stone church." It was built when basement houses were fashionable. The Sabbath school rooms were in the lower part, but the preaching was in the great room upstairs. There were some very queer but beautiful letters on the wall and they read: "Let The People Praise Thee, 0 God, Let All the People Praise Thee." The church had a most wonderful steeple. It was so tall that it seemed to

skated in winter. South of Gansell's prairie, the Midway Plaisance was a plaisance indeed, not a straight road connecting Jackson and Washington Parks, but a beautiful, shady, winding driveway through an oak grove, where grew the very finest wild strawberries.

Besides a Young Peoples Association, Major Cole had banded the young men inro a society called "The Yoke Fellows of Hyde Park." The Yoke Fellows distributed tracts, and put up racks containing tracts and a fine copy of the New Testament in the old Hyde Park depot, in the Kenwood and Woodlawn depots, and in the old dummy station on 55th Street.

Sweetest of all was the girls' prayer meeting. In 1879 Pastor Johnson's wife gathered the girls into her house and caught chem how co pray. The sweet influence of these weekly meetings, when timidly brave they prayed in turn, will never cease. Then the mothers had their meetings, where they discussed problems and prayed for their children. Every mother was pledged to teach her children a certain number of Bible verses and a hymn each month. We think we are busy now, but just glance over this weekly calendar with me.

It was just before the Civil War that the church was organized and two fine young men, Charles W. Everett and Curtiss Bogue, marched away from it to fight for freedom's cause. The one, Mr. Everett, received a mortal wound at the battle of Belmont; the ocher Mr. Bogue, returned home only to meet as tragic a death in the wreck of the Illinois Central Hyde Park train in 1862. There was yet another, a mere lad, Leonard, the only son of Elder and Mrs. Hassan Hopkins, who also went to war and died, a victim of the dread southern fever.

As already mentioned, a melodeon furnished the

music for the little white chapel in the grove. Mr. Henry C. Work, a charter member of the church, played it. He frequently went to church to practice, for as yet he had no piano in his Hyde Park home and he was working on a new war song. The finished song, "Marching through Georgia," was shown co Mr. George F. Root of the famous firm of Root and Cady, who published it. After the stone church was built, Mr. Root, author of "The Battle Cry of Freedom," "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching," and many ocher songs, conducted therein a weekly song service.

Then there was Norman B. Judd who nominated "the rail splitter and giant killer of Illinois," Abraham Lincoln, for the presidency of the United Scates. And Mr. Carmichael who rented two pews: one for his family and the other that the poor and stranger might always find a welcome place. And Mr. W. H. Ray, principal of Hyde Park High School as well as Superintendent of the Sabbath School.

There were numerous women who organized numerous associations: In 1884, when Presbyterian Hospital was founded, this church was one of the ►0

w ll I (.' I' '..1 0 0 0

-c@ first to respond and Mrs. Lodge, Mrs. Willoughby, Mrs. Leland, Mrs. Walter Nelson and Mrs. Charles Root were among those who attended the first meeting to make up bed and table linen for the new hospital. In 1883, the Young Ladies' Society joined with the young men and formed the Young People's Association and, with the Ladies Missionary Society, fitted out Miss Sadie C. Wirt for her long missionary journey to Laos. She is still there, but we know her now as Mrs. Peoples. The first Home Missionary sent out by the Society was Miss Albertine Butts, who went to work among the freedmen at the Mary Allen Seminary of Crockett, Texas.

No picture would be complete without mentioning Aunt Libbie Coffin. She went from door to door, collecting the mite boxes for the Missionary Societies, or selling aprons for the Ladies' Aid, and she presented everybody in town, including Inspector :Nicholas Hunt, with a small pocket pin cushion made with her own hands.

We have no records of the earliest meetings of these women's societies, but they are written above.

And when God shall come in glory and peace To collect all the debts we have made,

He'll s1-trely grant us a full release

Because of the church that stood in the shade. Cli

he program began with a group of bird songs by Mrs. Charles Robbins, after which there was a talk: We hired a horse and buggy to drive south to the little church. On our way we stopped at Kenwood, where my husband had recently purchased ten acres of ground on Lake Avenue in the vicinity of 47th street. I was impressed by the beautiful wild flowers growning on the place, especially the great clumps of white and purple phlox. We drove on to the little church where the gate posts were hung with the most beautiful wreaths of wild flowers, as large as a wagon wheel and as thick as my arm. Inside, the church was most prettily decorated with similar wiId flowers. There my memory stops. I do remember though, that before we drove home, we stopped at Mrs. Paul Cornell's and she gave us the most delicious cake. The sermon and the text have escaped me, but the memory of that

cake remains to this day.

-Mrs. P.L. Sherman, 50th Anniversary Book

Notes From the Archives

By Stephen Treffman,

archivist and contributing editor

FERRIS WHEEL FOLLOWUP

In our last issue, Patrick Meehan recounted the story of the construction of that great symbol of the World's Columbian Exposition, its Ferris Wheel. When the Fair closed on November 1, 1893, the question arose as to where the Ferris Wheel would next be located. Ini ially, the wheel remained up on the Midway Plaisance over that winter and, indeed, some thought was given to keeping it there permanently. Ambitious proposals were floated to transport the Wheel to a site in New York City's midtown Manhattan, its beach at Cooey Island or even to London, England. Nooe of hese came to fruition and in the early spring of 1894 it was carefully dismantled and its parts stored on flatcars on a siding off the Illinois Central tracks at 61st Street. Some of its original concrete base emaioed, however, and has been found just this year

10 the course of recent construction on the Midway.

In 1895, the Wheel's inventor, George Ferris, found a new site for it on Chicago's North Side where it wou d- be acc_ompaoied by a restaurant, beer garden, add1t10oal rides and a vaudeville theater. Ferris' partner in the plan was Charles T. Yerkes, the transit magnate who owned streetcar lines adjacent to the site. Resistance to the project arose from the community, 10wever, and delayed, but did not prevent, its opening m the fall of that year. The community, nonetheless, was able to vote the area closed to the sale of liquor which doomed the planned beer garden. '

The illustration above shows a panoramic view of the rebui_lt Ferris Wheel dominating the landscape west of Lmcolo Park. A reproduction of an admissions ticket for the ride confirms that, indeed, a vaudeville

program had been introduced as part of the attraction. .

The address on the ticket, 1288 North Clark Street is misleading on two counts in terms of where ;he Wheel in the above photo was actually located. Around 1909 there was a street renaming and renumbering project undertaken by the city. It was during this time, for instance, that many of Hyde Park's streets obtained their modern names. In this case, the street number "1288 N. Clark" from the year 1895 translates to a location on the west side of the 2600 block of North Clark Street, near Wrightwood Avenue, by the year 1910. Indeed, the whole strip of land from what is now 2619 to 2665 N. Clark was to be devoted to the enterprise. A McDonald's restaurant and a large apartment building are now on that site. The ride, which some have jocularly claimed drew more complaints and lawsuits than patrons, experienced financial problems and passed into receivership in 1896, about the same time that Ferris himself died unexpectedly at age 37. It continued to run, however. The postcard illustrating the cover of this issue was mailed by a patron of the north side wheel in 1901. The wheel had gone through yet another receivership in 1900 but remained in operation until 1_903 when it was dismantled and transported to the site of what would be its last hurrah.

When the Ferris Wheel was again reconstructed, it was on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis) of 1904 and renamed the Observation Wheel. I: did not achieve the same degree of celebrity there as 1t had had at the Chicago fair and was much less successful financially. When the fair closed, the ►G,

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-< Wheel was finally demolished by dynamite. Its boilers and engines were first removed, ultimately for industrial use in Pennsylvania and its 2700 tons of structural steel and iron and the plate glass windows and 2000 wire opera chairs in the passenger cars were sold as salvage. Coincidentally, the only remaining bui [ding from that exposition still in existence is its Palace of Fine Arts which today serves as the St. Louis Museum of Art. The major structural relic of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, of course, was also its Palace of Fine Arts, now the Museum of Science and Industry. What was called here "The Midway" was given the name "The Pier" in the St. Louis Exposition.

"La Grand Roue" (The Great Wheel), a French

version of the Ferris Wheel, was constructed for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Although the two appear very similar, when compared to a pl;iotograph of Chicago's Wheel, it can be seen that the Paris version allowed the cars to stand away from the outer rim thus allowing a broader view from the cars. In Chicago those rims blocked views from the sides of the cars as they rotated. The improved French version also appears to have had more cars, some 40 as opposed to the original's 36.

In historical accounts of the World's Columbian Exposition, the story of the Ferris Wheel has almost eclipsed that of another unusual mechanical and quite successful Midway attraction: Thomas Rankin's Snow and Ice Railway. Essentially a roller coaster running on an ice paved track, it was among the earliest coasters constructed in the United States. It was built on a tract of land 60 by 400 feet upon the southern portion of the Midway Plaisance near Lexington (later renamed University) Avenue and consisted of a loop with one high point of elevation. The ice was manufactured by machinery on site. There were two trains, each of which was made up of four connected bobsleds with six seats apiece. The trains would be drawn by a cable to the high point, then freed and allowed to slide down the inclines and around the loop. At the close of the Exposition, the Snow and Ice Railway was moved to Coney Island in Brooklyn but direct sunlight and insufficient refrigeration quickly closed the ride. As Canwell (1987) observed, "le was not the first idea to be duplicated from Chicago at Coney Island. It would seem that if certain entrepreneurs had their way, the complete Midway Plaisance would have been moved to Brooklyn." This is but one example of the influence the 1893 Columbian Exposition had on future expositions, amusement parks and American cultural life, generally.

Two major recent sources on the face of the Ferris Wheel include: Norman D. Anderson, Ferris \¥/heels: An Illmtrated History (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling

St. Louis Wheel, 1904

Green University Popular Press, 1992) and Perry R. Duis, Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life 1837-1920, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Our source on the Observation Wheel in St.

Louis is Timothy J. Fox and Duane R. Sneddeker,

From the Palaces to the Pike: Visions of the 1904 World's Fair (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press,

1997) and on the World's Columbian Exposition's Midway Plaisance Snow and Ice Machine: Robert Cartwell, The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster (Fair Oaks, Ohio: Amusement Park Press, 1987).

Materials Sought by the

Hyde Park Historical Society:

YEARBOOKS. We are trying to expand our holdings of the Hyde Park High School yearbook, the AITCHPE, in our Archives. We currently have editions for the following years: 1893, 1914, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1920,

1921, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930,

1931, 1932, 1934, 1944, 1947, 1955, 1956, 1960,

1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969 and

1972. While we will accept yearbooks from the University High School, the Laboratory Schools have what is believed to be a complete collection of their own. That, unfortunately, is not true for Hyde Park High School and we want to establish our Archives as a central location for their yearbooks.

EPHEMERA. If you have saved Hyde Park related items such as matchbooks, pins, advertising souvenirs, programs, menus, plates and silverware from old hotels and restaurants, postcards, clearly labeled photographs, or very old telephone directories, please consider donating them to our Society's Archives. Some of these may be among the few remaining artifacts of businesses, hotels, and restaurants now long gone from our area.

WORLD WAR II AND HYDE PARK. Memories and souvenirs of Hyde Park during World War II are of special interest to us. That was an intense period and if any of our readers who lived in Hyde Park during that period would like to share their memories, we would like to have them. What was Hyde Park like in those days? What changes in Hyde Park occurred during the War? Write us a letter and tell us about your experiences during that period.

If you wondering about making a donation of historic printed or other materials to the HPHS please write to our headquarters, call Alice Schlessinger at 773-493-1994 or send an email to her at alice@hydeparkhistory.org.

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5529 S. Lake Park Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Over the years, the Harvard ( later Harvard-St. George) School Yearbook has published the reminiscences of several former students. We reprint one below...

When Tarzan Went to Harvard

By Edgar Rice Burrroughs

Because I attended Harvard School sometime between the Pliocene and Pleistocene eras, Miss Schobinger has suggested that I write a little article for the School Annual and call it Before the Birth of Tarzan .... It was in 1888 that I entered the old Harvard School at 21st Street and Indiana Avenue, where my brother, Coleman, had been a student for a year. I was never a student-I just went to school there.

I lived over on the West Side where everybody made his money in chose days and then moved to the South Side to show off. I kept my pony in a livery stable on Madison Street west of Robey Street ... and in good weather I rode to school. In inclement weather, I took the Madison Street horse-cars to Wabash, a cable-car to 18th Street, and another horse-car to school.

Sometimes, returning from school, I used to run down Madison Street from State Street to Lincoln Street, a matter of some three miles, to see how many horse cars I could beat in that direction. It tires me all out even to think of it now. I must have been long on energy, if a trifle short on brains.

I cannot recall much about my classmates. Mancel Clark, Bennie Marshall, and I came over to Harvard together from Miss Coolie's Maplehurst School for Girls on the West Side-and were we glad to escape that blot on our escutcheons! There had been a diphtheria epidemic in the public schools the previous year, and our fond parents had prevailed upon Miss Coolie to take us in...

Bennie Marshall and I used to sneak down to the breakwater and smoke cubeb cigarettes and feel real devilish. I imagine we even chewed gum too. He became a very famous Chicago architect (with Charles

Eli Fox, he designed

the Drake Hotel-Ed.) I can see

him now sitting at his desk drawing pictures and chewing his tongue when he should have been studying.

At Harvard School I studied Greek and Latin because someone believed that they should be taught before English grammar was taken up; then I went to Andover and studied Greek and Latin all over again. So, having never studied English, I conceived the brilliant idea of taking up writing as my profession. Perhaps, had I studied English grammar, I would have known better, but then there would have been no Tarzan ... There should be a moral to this. Perhaps it is that one should not smoke cubeb cigarettes.

REMEMBERING GWENDOLYN BROOKS

by Stephen A. Treffman, HPHS Archivist

"MAY THE NEW CENTURY SING TO YOU."

Ac our last annual meeting, HPHS had to be satisfied with giving Gwendolyn Brooks an award in absentia. In lieu of placing the Paul Cornell Award into her hands, we sent it to her accompanied by a copy of Bert Benade's remarks (see page 3) along with a report on how receptive our board and membership had been to the idea of granting her our'award.

In an enthusiastic response, Ms. Brooks sent the Society two books, warmly inscribed, along with a note gently reminding us that she was a working writer, one who wrote to be read, not celebrated. All the punctuation is hers.

March 9, 2000 Hi.' I thank you/or your bea11ti/1tl Tribute.' "Read'' these books ( .'-as if you have TIME Galore.') ... before delivering to the Library.' Grate/ttlly Gwen Brooks ( I thank you ALL for honoring me.')

She gave us the second volume of her "autobiography," Report from Part Two. (Chicago, Third World Press, 1996) The inscription reads: For the Library of the Hyde Park Historical Society. ( May the New Century SING to yo1-1.') Three large pink post-it-notes were inserted indicating stories she especially wanted us to notice: "My Mother," "In Ghana," and "Black Woman in Russia."

The ocher book is a self-published work, Children Coming Home (Chicago, 1991). It consists of short poems expressing the reflections of children under stress as they arrive home from school.

Two additional books came to us last June. The inscription in Thirty-First Annual Illinois Poet Laureate Awards. 2000 (Chicago: privately printed) reads:

Thank you so much.' For the copy of "Hyde Park History." Yes, I'd appreciate two or three extra copies. I hope you enjoy the young people's poems. I gave 45 prizes of $100 each on June 12 at the U. of C. I'm so proud of them.'"

Each page contains a single winning poem. At the bottom of each sheet is written, in Gwendolyn Brooks' hand, the name of the student, his or her age, grade and school. She had good reason to be proud of them. In

the introduction, she addressed this note to the winners:

Congratulations.' ... on winning your Illinois Poet Laureate Award.' I am proud of you, and I am proud to meet yoll. I appreciate yo11r respect for poetry and interest in experimenting with language-with sound and texture and manner.

All of yo11r life, poetry can be a nourishing gift to yourself, a performance to enjoy and change; an irresistible influence.

Gwendolyn Brooks, an extraordinarily perceptive witness of our corner of the world, "sang" to us for more than half of the last century. She crafted deceptively simple lines of verse that communicated profound insights, enlightened us and enriched the world in which we live. We are grateful to have had her among us, honored chat we could call her one of our own and were drawn more closely into community because of what she did with her life. We feel especially fortunate that we had the opportunity to tell her so while she was still among us.

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PRESENTATION OF THE PAUL CORNELL AWARD TO GWENDOLYN BROOKS

HPHS ANNUAL MEETING, FEBRUARY 26, 2000

Remarks by Berrt Benade

Our final awardee is the Poet Laureate of Illinois, Gwendolyn Brooks. We are sorry chat she cannot be with us tonight. But, in a way, I am fortunate that she isn,'t here because she might protest the oits and pieces of her life that I want to share with you.

In 1972 she published her autobiography. It is not about chronology but process, and, though the book stops in the year 1972, her process of enrichment has continued.

She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, and was three years old when her family moved to Chicago. Here she had many homes: 46th and Lake Park, 56th and Lake Park, 43rd and Champlain, among others. And now she lives south of 55th Street on South Shore Drive.

At age seven, she started rhyming words and by eleven was putting poems in notebooks-still in her possession. Her mother told her she would be "a lady Paul Lawrence Dunbar someday." Her family was warm and supportive, but she chose to be a loner who wrote poetry. She attended high school at Hyde Park Branch, Englewood and Wendell Phillips and then went on to Wilson Junior college. As a young teen ager she sent her work to well-known poets, among them Langston Hughes who responded enthusiastically and with whom she remained friends for life.

Later on, when Oscar Brown Jr. helped the Blackstone Rangers create "Opportunity Please Knock," he asked her to review it. She was so taken by the project that she srayed with the Rangers to help them write and develop it. (Incidentally,

"Opportunity Please Knock" was an exhilarating piece of theater.)

She went on Freedom Rides and slowly realized how deep and unconscious discrimination can be. She notes that even in Merriam Webster's Dictionary it shows up. When you look up the word "black," one of the meanings is given as "opposite of white." However, when you look up 11white11, there is no mention of "black." For her, integration then began to

mean when Negroes (the educated, professional elite) embraced equally all Blacks (the masses).

Not having an "earned" degree, she now bas a whole string of Honorary Doctorates and many other accolades, but the ones she loves come from elsewhere. She speaks about a note from a 16 year old boy who was going to quit school until he heard her recite her poem "We Real Cool."

"Now I know there is no place like school, I would want co cell her how I feel inside my heart."

Gwendolyn Brooks never stops growing. In 1971, she flew for the first time and loved it "because it opened up new horizons-being airborne." She speaks with an open heart and doesn't have rules chat constrain her. One of her contemporaries says of her, "She is the continuing storm that walks the English language as lions walk in Africa." Her convictions, her strengths and her commitment come out of an exciting and inspiring life.

Ours is an Historical Society and the Cornell Award

is intended to confer recognition upon persons who have preserved or extended our understanding and appreciation of Hyde Park's history. Gwendolyn Brooks' contribution has been to give voice and perspective to the story of the African American community which has developed within and become so important to the history of Chicago's south side and to Hyde Park. In the process she has enriched the lives of all of us.

Paul Cornell Awards Committee, 2000

Bert Benade, Chair Devereaux Bowley Stephen A. Treffman

S J> r 'I n !J 2 0 0 I

WASHINGTON PARK HOTEL

A rare view of the Washington Park Hotel has been found on a trade card dating from 1893. Trade cards were precursors to the picture postcard as an advertising medium. Curiously, the card manages to connect the recent exhibit on old hotels of that era and our article on Hyde Park's cable cars. The hotel stood at the southeast corner of 55th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, where The University of Chicago's athletic field is now. The 200 room hotel, potential clients were cold, was situated so that visitors, depending on their room, could get a "grand view" of buildings at the World's Columbian

Exposition, the "artistically arranged flower beds" of Washington Park, and "the great power house of the Wabash and Cottage Grove Avenue Cable Cars." The latter stood directly across the street from the hotel on the northeast corner of that intersection. A Chicago City Railway's cable car, clearly marked Number 1597, is depicted heading south on Cottage Grove. It is rumored that the concrete and stone base of the cable car power house still exists on its original site, buried deep under the ground. The hotel itself was demolished during urban renewal in the 1950s. -S.A.T.

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011r thanks to Board Member Carol Bradford for bringing m this glimpse of ottr history

IN MEMORY OF

EDWIN BURRITT SMITH

After the close of the World's Columbian Exposition, in the mid-1890's, Chicagoans began to look seriously and critically at the social, economic, and political circumstances of their city. They saw a city government whose members were known to enrich themselves at public expense. It tolerated gambling, prostitution, bribery, vote fraud, abuse of patronage, and monopolistic control of public utilities which yielded enormous private profit. The Municipal Voters' League and other organizations were formed in an effort to address these problems. They were part of the larger Progressive movement which swept the country during this time. The reformers also worked to ameliorate the harmful effects of industrialism and business monopolies: urban slums, poverty, and unsafe working conditions.

A Hyde Park attorney, Edwin Burritt Smith, was a prominent and active participant in the reform efforts. At the time of his death on May 9, 1906, a memorial service was held at the University Congregational Church, with tributes from many men who were prominent locally and nationally in the Progressive Movement. The church devoted one entire issue of its monthly newsletter, The Chronicle, to printing the texts of their tributes, excerpts of which are included here.

"He found time to throw himself into those lines of thought, and especially of activity, which promised to open a door of opportunity to man, which promised to release at

any point the motive and the possibility of self-growth, and self-government. He did thoroughly and obstinately believe in mcm...So far as he could choose to have it so, the employment of his professional powers was in the interest of a more adequate and abundant life to the individual" Rev. Frederick Dewhurst, the eulogy.

"For, more than upon anything else, his whole life centered down upon the welfare of the commonwealth, which called forth all his energies into their most virile expression In

his vision each such stmggle as that for the civil service law, for honesty and capacity in city government, for the municipal control of public utilities, for the peaceful progress of the nation in the spirit of its constitution and history, and for the social unification of our cosmopolitan people by social settlements and other centers of human equality, was only part of the one great came of a sane,

safe and progressive democracy. To that greatest cause Mr. Smith devoted the fine abilities and tremendo11,s energies of his life with a generosity and courage, that never seemed to count the personal cost of his public service."

Letter from Graham Taylor.

Mr. Smith was born in Spartanburg, PA, in 1854. His parents were both teachers who died when he was very young. He spent some of his youth in an orphanage and seemed destined for a life of obscure poverty. Yet his fortitude, vigor, far-seeing hope, and intelligence enabled him to triumph over every obstacle. As a teenager, he was a farm hand, then became a teacher. From 1874 to 1876 he studied at Western Reserve and Oberlin College. After that, he came to Chicago and decided this would be his home. He left to study law at Yale, but after earning his degree in 1880 he returned to Chicago and plunged into his work as an author and teacher of the law. He soon became involved in many of the reform movements which were active in the city during this time.

"He was a giant of affairs, a prodigy of facts but his heart was gentleness itself."

Letter from John G. Wooley.

He and his wife had two sons, Curtis and Otis. The family lived at 5530 South Cornell and were ►@

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--<@ active and faithful members of the University Congregational Church, located at 56th Street and Dorchester Avenue.

"His death is a calamity. Few men of my time have brought to the service of the public, such intelligence, such ability, such unselfish devotion, such untiring zeal.

Unpopularity had no terrors for him, preferment no temptations. and when he decided that a certain co1,1rse was right he brought to its support all of his powers witho11t tho11ght of personal consequences. He rendered conspimous service to his city, to his state and to his country witho11t asking any recognition for himself..."

Letter from Moorfield Storey.

A primary target of the reform effort was Charles T. Yerkes, who held a monopoly of most of the streetcar companies. "With shrewdness, cunning, and force of personality; through continuous stock manipulation; and never without back-door political dealing and bribery, Yerkes constructed a purposely tangled maze of companies that facilitated his kind of large-scale financing. Nor was it happenstance that directly or indirectly he controlled most of the companies that contracted for his projects, nor that those companies' billings were astronomical. Nor that every contractor who did work for him kicked back part of the padded charges." (Johnson, p. 2) Smith was the attorney chosen by the city council to advise it and assist in drafting legislation which would break this abusive monopoly. He was also one of the attorneys chosen by the Chicago Bar Association to investigate the possibility of establishing a separate juvenile court system.

''The list of his civic activities is a history of the better Chicago, not yet a good Chicago, b11t a vigorous militant demonstration that the great city is the hope of democracy. The earliest step was the passage and adoption of the Civil Service Law. In that movement he was deeply identified.

He worked early and hard in the Civic Federation. Prow its inception he was one of the strongest men in the M,micipal Voters' League, where his calm co11rage, his legal knowledge and his power of analysis and statement made hirn especially terrible to evil doers Without

hesitation he favored, what some call the 'socialism· of municipal ownership, as an antidote to the 'anarchism' of private ownershijJ as practiced in Chicago The traction

problem with its three 1tgly heads. political, physical and legal, claimed a vast amount of his time and attention, .• "MR. SMITH AS A CITIZEN" by William Kent.

"The range of his practice was wide and varied. He

was active in litigation involving questions of p11blic interest. the civil service law, the Hyde Park Protective

Association. and all are familiar with his recent activities as special co11ncil for the city of Chicago in the important traction litigation which seems now to be drawing to a close."

"MR. SMITH AS A LAWYER" by Judge H. V.

Freeman.

''Chicago was in a fierce stmggle for better transportation-her citizens for over forty years had been struggling against odds to free themselves from what they felt was an ,mrighteous claim by the companies-a comprehensive st11dy of the practical and engineering problems had been made by the Council. The Committee having the subject matter in charge required legal advice of high order to gNide it in negotiation and in putting in legal form the conclmions reached...(it} began to look

abo11t for a man.....M," Smith was selected for this important position.''

"MR. SMITH'S SERVICE TO THE CITY"

by Frank I. Bennett

"It is pleasant to think that, altho11gh Mr. Smith's activities touched the whole life of the city, and in many cases the interests of the nation, this ch11rch and comrmmity were his home. He belonged especially to us. And here will be his memorial."

"MR. SMITH'S RELATION TO THE CHURCH"

by Prof. A. H. Tolman

In his memory, a stained glass window depicting the Old Testament Prophets was placed in the wall of the church. This window is now placed in the Rittenhouse Chapel of the United Church of Hyde Park.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Block, Jean. Hyde Park Houses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 60-63.

The Chronicle of the University Congregational Church, Chicago. Vol. 11, No. 5. May 1906.

Johnson, Curt. Wicked City Chicago: From Kenna to Capone. Highland Park: December Press, 1994.

Lindberg, Richard. Chicago Ragtime: Another Look at Chicago. 1880-1920. South Bend: Icarus Press, 1985.

Spinney, Robert G. City of Big Shoulders: A History of Chicago. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000.

Tanenhaus, David S. "Justice for the Child: The Beginning of the Juvenile Court in Chicago" in Chicago History. Winter 1998-99, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, pp. 4-19.

Si,rinn '.1001

A Word from Our President

Alice Schlessinger

A NEW PROJECT FOR THE SOCIETY

Last year, through the good offices of Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, we received a grant of $2,500 to help us start a project in aid of education for our community's school children. We used the money to set up a web page, with the hope that it could provide access to our archives for those who are studying community history. You may see this page by going on the internet and looking up www.hydeparkhistory.org.

This year we are to receive $5,000 from Senator Barack Obama and Representative Currie. With these additional funds we are launched on working with the schools. We've started with Ray School. We have met with the computer teacher at Ray, and spoken with the principal there. Our method is to offer help to teachers whose curriculum includes study of the community-third and eighth grades. With the

assurance that we shall receive our full funding, we are planning to expand our pilot project to Brete Harte and Murray Schools and to Kenwood High School. In the future we will expand to all the schools in our community.

We hope that this project will result in an interactive exchange-we can provide the information about rhe fascinating history of this community. We hope that the students will pose material from their work on our page, so that others, all around the world, will be able to see what our students can do. We also expect that information will flow in both directions as a result of this effort.

We are very grateful to Barbara and Barack for their help in getting us started on this exciting step in making the archives and newsletters of the Society available to the young people of our area, and in strengthening the bond between us.

WORLD WAR II AND HYDE PARK

Memories and artifacts of Hyde Park during World War 11 would be of great interest to us. That was an intense period and if any of our readers who lived in Hyde Park during that period would like to share their memories, we would like to have them. What was Hyde Park like in those days? What changes in Hyde Park occurred during the War? Write us a letter and tell us about your experiences during that period. We are also seeking Hyde Park memorabilia from that period. -S.A.T.

A CABLE CAR TRAINMAN-a burly bearded grip man, bundled in a thick fur coat and gloves against the harsh wintry elements. This steel engraving by T. de Thulstrup, appeared on the cover of the February 25, 1893 issue of Harper's Weekly. It is hard to judge, but the passengers appear to be either miserable or, as dutiful Hyde Parkers, deep in thought. Life was not easy in those days.

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So Soon?

Pioneer Days of the Hyde Park Historical Society

A talk given by Clyde Watkins, a founder of the Society, at the annual meeting, February 20, 1999

he title of "founder" is probably undeserved, because it implies an image of some lone and far-sighted character doing things by himself.

That was never the case with us-we were a typical Hyde Park committee from the start. If the organization we celebrate was indeed my idea, I must assume that others had at least considered it long before I ever did. What spurred me to action, however, was the confluence of two forces in my life.

First, in the late 1960s after I was out of college and therefore it was too late to change my major one last time-I began to develop an interest in U.S. history, especially Chicago history, between about 1870 and 1910. Plenty of ochers were ahead of me in that, fortunately, and there is a lot of wonderful literature, plus many enthralling phocographs, available for study.

Second, I always had a thing about that great little building. Throughout my undergraduate years at the University, whenever I would pull an "all-nighter" in yet another vain attempt to salvage some term

paper--or worse yet, an entire course-I would inevitably end up around 6:00am savoring the 42 cent

Clyde Watkins, HPHS Founder

special at Steve's Lunch. (For that price you got two eggs, bacon, potatoes, toast and coffee!) I loved the building, and continued to fantasize about what I later learned to call "adaptive reuse." No doubt my first notions were along the lines of a swingin' bachelor pad or the nightclub I yearned co run at that age. But as I matured, I continued to watch the building through its subsequent incarnations and its decline. I knew it was somehow associated with the great Illinois Central Station from the World's Colombian Exposition, but at that point I wasn't exactly sure how, and there was no one to tell me-or so I thought.

By 1974 the building had sunk to the level of a storage shed for the two-wheeled cares they used for

delivering newspapers, and it was clearly headed for rUin.

Coincidentally, Albert Tannler, assistant curator of

special collections at Regenscein Library at that time, had just completed the first edition of One in Spirit, ►8

-<O the pictorial history of the University, and it captivated me, primarily because of its many references to the concurrent development (or disintegration and redevelopment) of the neighborhood. And that was the moment of my epiphany. A local historical society could undertake the research and preservation of its past in context of the ciry of Chicago and the nation. And such an

organization could house itself in my favorite structure (the true identity of which I now appreciated). Let the psycho-historians ponder which was the means and which the end; in my mind the two were linked from the start.

Here are a few dates and events that led to our eventual founding:

• April/May, 1975.

Tom Jensen, a U-High classmate, and I organized the first public forum to discuss the establishment of a proposed "Hyde Park-Kenwood Hiscorical League." We met at St. Thomas Church and Len Despres was our speaker. (I cannot find the exact date, bur I believe a copy of the flyer from the meeting is already in our archives.)

• June 24, 1975.

Several of us met at Jean Block's apartment for lunch ro discuss how to get organized and moving. It took a while, as it turned out...

• January 13, 1976.

A larger formation was hosted by Victoria Ranney in her home.

• March 22, 1976.

Another planning meeting was hosted by Thelma Dahlberg at her home, followed by yet another in April. These meetings continued throughout the following eight months.

• June 15, 1976.

My calendar indicates that this was my first meeting with Win Kennedy to discuss acquiring the building.

• November 8, 1976.

Jean and I called on Muriel Beadle to ask her to become our first president. She agreed on the spot and decreed that the name of the organization would be the Hyde Park Historical society. She hosted our first official board meeting at her home two weeks later on November 22.

• January 28, 1978.

The Hyde Park Historical Society received its official charter as an Illinois not-for-profit corporation.

• March 27, 1978.

Robert and Lucille Rouse, owners of 5529 South Lake Park, finally signed the bill of sale for the property, for

$4,000, after continued and heroic efforts by Len Despres to close the deal. Kennedy, Ryan, Monigal Associates was our agent.

• February 2, 1979.

Our first lease for the land under our building was signed with the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad - five years at $20 per year.

• July 20, 1980.

The "Completion Fund," our $45,000 capital campaign to purchase and renovate the headquarters, kicked off on July 4, 1978, initiated by a "Charter Membership" drive for 100 members at $100 each. Encouraged by a $10,000 challenge grant from the Field Foundation of Illinois, the drive was successfully concluded. Jean Block was instrumental in this effort.

• October 26, 1980.

The Grand Opening of our magnificently renovated and restored new headquarters took place, thanks to Dev Bowly's endless talent, work and sacrifice. We began with a parade down Lake Park Avenue and concluded with speeches that will live forever, assuming anyone remembered to keep notes, which I doubt.

Some of the earliest board members are still serving: Dev Bowly, Carol Bradford, Alta Blakely and Richardson Spofford. Other early members were Ted Anderson, Margaret Fallers, Gary Husted, Muriel Beadle, Jean Block, Berenece Boehm, Randy Holgate, Anita Anderson, Michael Conzen, Rory Shanley Brown, Thelma Dahlberg, Phillis Kelly, Betty Borst, Eleanor Swift, Leon Despres, Charles Beckett, Maggie Bevacqua, Malcolm Collier, Emma Kemp, Gerhardt

Laves, John McDermott, and Clyde Watkins. CD

s I' ,. n !J s II Ill Ill t.' I !) \I !)

Papa John Remembered

by Devereaux Bowly, Jr.

When I was a kid at the Lab School and U-High in the 1950s and early 60s, there was a street vendor at 59th and Kenwood. He was called Papa John and sold delicious kosher hoc dogs for 25 or 35 cents. He had a small white painted wooden and glass push care with an antique copper alcohol burner to keep the dogs hoc and the rolls warm and moist.

Papa John was a small man, not five feet tall, who talked little, ocher than to ask what the customer wanted on his or her hot dog. His home base was a tiny brick building, which no longer exists, on the southeast corner of 56th and Lake Park, next to the IC tracks. The building lacer housed Chicken-A-Go-Go, run by Morry and his son, who developed

delicatessens on 55th Street, in Hutchinson Commons and elsewhere. PapaJohn's building should not be confused with the wooden hot dog shack which was located one block east, on the southwest corner of 56th and Stony Island, surrounded by a Yellow Cab dispatch station.

As I remember it, each school day in good weather Papa John, who seemed to me to be in his seventies or eighties, would slowly push his cart over co the Lab School at about 2:30, and stay for a couple of hours before returning. At some point he disappeared without explanation. We would appreciate hearing

from anyone who knows more about Papa John. CD

The Powhatan Building

(and Narragansett just to the west) c. 1930

Postcard from the collection of Stephen A Treffman

MORE ABOUT THE POWHATAN ON PAGE 4.

Barbara Mirecki of the Powhatan Building Corporation accepts the award for the "meticulous restoration of the building's Art Deco lobby." Ward Miller accepts for Judith Bromley and Dr Serifino Garella "for the exterior and interior renovation of their home, Frank Lloyd Wright's Heller House. He also accepts for Vinci/Hemp, Inc., Architects, for their work on both of those projects

Renovation of The Powhatan Lobby Wins Paul Cornell Award

By \,\1/ard Miller, Vinci/Hamp Architects, Inc.

The Powhatan is a 23-story residential co-op building, located on the lakefront at 4950 South Chicago Beach Drive in Hyde Park. The building was designed in 1929 by two architects, Robert Degolyer and Charles Morgan, in a thoroughly modern "skyscraper style" reflecting the structure of the building's skeleton beneath. This type of building style and construction is now associated with the "Art Deco" movement chat flourished during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. The colored spandrel panels on the south and ease sides of the building, along with all of the ornamental features of the Powhatan and the adjacent Narragansett building are the work of the building's co-architect, Charles Morgan, who was an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright. In recent years The Powhatan has been designated an official Chicago Landmark.

Vinci/Hamp was hired by a committee of individuals from the building to repair the original terrazzo floor which had been obsrnred by wall to wall carpeting, concealing its rich auburn colored field bordered with black terrazzo. This work included the repair of cracks in the terrazzo as well as restoring the floor's luster. The existing furnishings and finishes within the lobby space were also re-designed at the same time.

Published historic photographs indicate that the lobby of The Powhatan was once a richly ornamented

space, later obliterated by a series of remodelings. Investigations within the wall cavity by Ward Miller of Vinci/Hamp Architects, Inc., revealed the presence of original finishes, including pigmented plaster sgraffito mosaics by Morgan. Removal of the walls further revealed the original stepped terrazzo fireplace, fluted pilasters, decorative case-iron grills, and mosaics. All original finishes were repaired and restored in the course of chis project, including the stylized fluted pilasters, the figured walnllt paneling and the original color scheme.

Two artists, Ms. Jo Hormmh and Mr. John Phillips of

Chicago Architectural Arcs, were hired to clean and remove subsequent layers of paint from the mosaics and ro reinvent Morgan's original techniques, which facilitated the repair and replacement of missing tiles. The original "stylized geometric" wood and glass entry doors were found by Mr. John Graaman, the building's superintendent, in an attic storage room and were reinstalled. On the east wall above the windows, an air conditioning system was integrated inro a reconstructed soffic, which had been destroyed. All plaster surfaces were repaired or recreated by Luczak Brothers Plastering Company of Chicago. The original silver/gold paint colors with luminous metallic particles were supplied by the Cres-Lice company, a Chicago firm, and applied by Onassis Painting and Decorating Company of Kenilworth. Furniture and carpeting were selected to complement the remaining original furniture pieces. ►

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Powhatan lobby before restoration. Walls conceal mosaics and pilasters.

Original fireplace, fluted pilasters and mosaics after being uncovered. Note damaged/painted mosaics ...

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Restored fireplace and sgraffito mosaics. The destroyed mosaic of Chief Powhatan

has been replaced with an etched glass mirror with geometric pattern.

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Other Cornell Award Winners ...

Devereaux Bowly presents the Paul Cornell Award to Marian and Leon Despres ...a lifetime achievement award "for their promotion of interest in Hyde Park and Chicago History as well as in architectural preservation."

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THE CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE FOUNDATION offers tours

of the city and surrounding areas...

Hyde Park

HPHS board member, Doug Anderson, invites you to walk with him through the University Campus and along the streets of Hyde Park with its houses dating from the 1860s to the 1950s, including the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House.

Sundays, 1:30pm

June 20, August 15, October 17

Meet at Rockefeller Chapel, 59th & Woodlawn Cost $8 (CAF members $3)

Jackson Park - 1893 Revisited

A pictorial re-creation of the Fair of 1893 examines how Frederick Law Olmsted transformed marshes and dunes into the beautiful park which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Also visit Osaka Garden.

Saturdays, 10:30am

August 14, September 25, October 9 Meet at Clarence Darrow Bridge

Cost $5 (CAF members free)

Call Doug Anderson, 773-493-7058, for information

Do you know how many birds live in-or visit-Hyde Park?

On May 8th, the 25th Annual Spring Bird Count for the area of Jackson Park, took place.

This year's report states:

Birds were generally in good numbers ...the total number of species was among the highest ever observed in a day at Jackson Park. Warbler diversity was especially high at 29 species, including several notably scarce species. During the course of a given spring one is lucky to find such species as Prairie, Cerulean, Worm-eating, Kentucky, and Hooded Warblers at all; and seeing all of them in a single day has little precedent.

Observers began at 5:10am at four sites along the lakefront ...Two pre-sunrise finds were a Nighthawk at Promontory Park and a Common Moorhen at 64th Street. The last observation of the day was at 7:20pm-a Worm eating Warbler feeding along the sidewalk at 56th and Harper'

Other highlights included four Great Egrets, the Park's first spring count Snow Goose, 115 Canada Geese, 16

Blue-Grey Gnatcatchers, and even one Tennessee Warbler1 Total number of birds counted: 3,542! To participate in

bird-watching, call Doug Anderson, 493-7058.

MEMO

To: HPHS Members

From: HPHS President, Alice Schlessinger Re: Update on our headquarters repairs

The Society has encountered a number of scmccural problems during the last year. Our roof badly needed replacing and our plumbing connection ro the outside sewer had become clogged with tree roots. Thanks to Devereux Bowly and Bert Benade, our Building Committee, these projects have been successfully completed. The handsome new roof, which is consistent with our 19th Century building, should last for many years. The plumbing obstruction has been removed-a major project which required investigation with a video camera and excavation

below the office floor.

Our little headquarters building is ready for you to visit though we still have more work to do. We hope co complete it over the summer months.

Thanks co our members who responded to a single letter with such generosity-over $5,000 has been contributed-and co the University of Chicago which has awarded us a grant of $3,000, we have not had to dig too deeply into our reserve funds to cover the expenses incurred.

We thank the following contriburors to this Special Fund:

Mary S. Allan Ruth & Dick Allen

Douglas C. Anderson Bert Benade

Roland & Helen Bailey Marjorie Benson

Alta Blakely

Mrs. Charles Borst Devereux Bowly

Carol & Jesse Bradford Jim & Jane Comiskey George & Louise Cooley Mr. & Mrs. Paul Cornell Irene & Charles Custer Thelma Dahlberg George & Jackie Davis

Bernard J. Delgiorno

Leon & Marian Despres Dr. & Mrs. Jar! Dyrud Terry P. Ellis

Norah & William Erickson John & Sally Fish

Jay & Iris Frank Edlyn Freerks

Susan & Paul Freehling Roger & Madelon Fross Ethel Goldsmith

Sherry Goodman & Richard Watt Audrey & Ronald Grzywinski Samuel Hair

Chauncey & Edith Harris Albert M. Hayes

Jane & Roger Hildebrand Dorothy Horton

Mary E. Irons

Mr. & Mrs. Richard Jaffe Ruth T. Kaplan

Emile Karafiol Ruth & Gwin Kolb

Mr. & Mrs. Philip Luhmann Inge Maser

Margaret S. Matchett Jane & George Mather Theresa McDermott Louis & Joan Mercuri Janee & David Midgely Harold Moody

Aurelia Moody

Mr. & Mrs. Jay F. Mulberry Ward & Dorothy Perrin

Robert, Rica & Kathleen Picken George W. Placzman

Elizabeth M. Postell

Mr. & Mrs. James Ratcliffe

Hope E. Rhinescine Robert Rigacci

Mr. & Mrs. Edward Rosenheim Mrs. Alice Rubovics

Harriet Rylaarsdam

Alice & Nathan Schlessinger Mr. & Mrs. Robert G. Schloerb Arthur & Carol Schneider Frank & Karen Schneider Mindy A. Schwartz

Kevin Shalla & Vicroria Ferrara Mr. & Mrs. Richardson Spofford Fred & Nikki Stein

Helm uc Strauss

Marcia & Stephen Thomas Dr. Paul W. Tieman

Mr. & Mrs. Stephen A. Treffman Antionette Tyskling

Vi Fogle Uretz

Frank & Betty Wagner Marcin Wallace

Mrs. Margaret Walters Clyde & Cheryl Watkins Mrs. Warner Wick

Kale & Helen Williams Ruch & Quentin Young

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The Sisson Hotel, 53rd Street at Lake Michigan

Postcard from the co/lect1on of Stephen A. Treffman

UPCOMING EXHIBIT...

THE BOOM YEARS: 1916-1930,

second in our two-part exhibition on Hyde Park's historic hotels, will present views from the second great wave of apartment hotel construction, the period in which much of the architectural landscape of modern Hyde Park took shape. The exhibit is scheduled to open later this summer after repairs to our headquarters are completed. In the meantime, we are still seeking printed materials, menus, photos, or souvenirs of these hotels for this exhibit. We will welcome any items our readers wish to contribute, loan, or allow us to photocopy.

For more information, please call

Steve Treffman at (773) 241-5528.

SURF AT THE POINT IN WINTER

In 1987. to mark the 50th anniversary of Promontory Point. the Hyde Park Historical Society and Friends of the Parks produced a brief history of that landmark landscape. Today. when interest in the Point is so high. we think it timely to reprod11ce that dowwent for yot1r information...

Promontory Point

1937-1987

By John McDermott, Jr.

Edited by Victoria Post Ranney

Promontory Point, at 55th Street and Lake Michigan, is an historic landscape and the focal point of Chicago's Burnham Park. Conceived as part of Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago, in 1909, "the Point" was created by landfill in the 1920s and landscaped in 1937 by Alfred Caldwell in the Prairie School tradition. To Caldwell, the Promontory represented the meeting place of the vast prairie and the Great Lakes, and thus symbolized all that was unique about the landscape of Chicago. Today, Caldwell's design can still be recognized, and its spirit

makes Promontory Point a favorite retreat for Chicagoans from all walks of life.

An early Chicagoan walking east on 55th Street would have met the lake just east of Everett Avenue. Burnham called for a promontory co be built in the lake near 52nd Street, along with a series of islands and lagoons screeching from 12th Street co Jackson Park. In 1919, the City Council approved a plan co fill in the south lakeshore according co Burnham's plan.

The Commissioners of the South Park District hired the Construction Materials Corporation co construct a breakwater and fill the area inside it with sand. The filling operation, which began at 12th Street and progressed coward the south, reached 5 5ch Street by 1924. There, and not at 52nd Street, it created a promontory.

By 1926, the 55th Street Promontory, as it came co be called, had been largely filled with sand and garbage. The latter component upset the Hyde Park Herald which complained not only chat the rubbish was unsightly, but also that the wind blew sand and foul odors into the new apartment buildings nearby.

In 1917, there had been only one such building near 55th and the lake, the ten-story apartment house at 5490 South Shore Drive. Bue in the mid-1920's, the residential area to the west developed rapidly. The ►@

-cO huge Shoreland Hotel was completed in 1926, and the Flamingo opened in 1927. These buildings began a wave of hotel growth that eventually provided 20,000 rooms in East Hyde Park.

By 1929, grass was planted on the Promontory. Leif Erickson Drive (now Lake Shore Drive) was opened to traffic and trees were planted on the portion of landfill west of the Drive. But construction did not proceed until the consolidated Chicago Park District was formed in 1934. At about that time, Fifth Ward Alderman James Cusak began to receive complaints that the Promontory was being used as a makeshift parking lot by the nearby Shoreland Hotel. In an interview shortly before his death in 1986, Cusak said that he had used his influence with the Park District's new general superintendent, George T. Donoghue, to have the parking lot removed and the Promontory developed.

Whether or not Cusak's influence played a role, the

Promontory, in 193 5,was designated to receive funds and workers from the Works Progress Administration. It was one of 67 Illinois parks which the WPA assisted during the Depression. Thanks to the WPA, the Point was developed as we know it today.

The planning was assigned to Alfred Caldwell, an architect and landscape architect on the Park District staff. From 1926 to 1931, Caldwell had assisted Jens Jensen, the great landscape architect of Chicago's West Park system and the pre-eminent figure in the Prairie School movement in his field. Caldwell shared Jensen's devotion to the midwestern landscape and his practice of using only native plants in his parks.

Caldwell began by adding soil, raising the meadow to its present height and creating a hill where a shelter would be built. By the summer of 1936, water and sewer pipes had been laid, and the underpass below the Drive was completed.

Caldwell's planting plan, dated September 1, 1936, relied on indigenous plants. It included 241 American elms, 50 American lindens, and 637 prairie crabapples, as well as sugar maples, hop hornbeams, and two varieties of hawthorn, the tree which had been one of Jensen's trademarks.

The thick groves of trees and shrubs formed a ring around a large central meadow which sloped downward gradually toward the path. The ring was interrupted at the north, allowing a spectacular view of the downtown skyline, and at the south, where the vast manufacturing districts of South Chicago and Indiana were visible on the horizon. The Point includes two distinct experiences: the lofty meadow, from which the rocks along the water cannot be seen, and the rocks themselves, from which the meadow cannot be seen. Plantings on the outer edge of the

The outline of Promontory Point is clearly visible in the shape of the breakwater under construction in the lake, captured in this rare aerial photograph from the early l 920's. Within a few years, the area inside the seawall was filled with sand and rubbish, and eventually became part of Burnham Park.

The lone high-rise apartment building near the lake is 5490 South Shore Drive, built in 1917.

An aerial view from September, 1936, showing construction of the Promontory well underway. The paths are in place, the underpass has been built, and tons of new soil have been added.

Summer 2001

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View from the roof of the Flamingo Hotel, May 1938.

The Shelter is finished, the ground has been graded and levelled and some trees have been planted.

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peninsula once reinforced this distinction.

Caldwell said in a 1986 interview that he had conceived of the Promontory as "a place you go co and you are thrilled-a beautiful experience, a joy, a delight." He sought co convey "a sense of space and a sense of the power of nature and the power of the sea."

A member of the Park District's architectural staff,

E. V. Buchsbaum, designed the shelter (now known as the fieldhouse). Construction began in 1936 and was finished the next year. The walls were made of Lannon scone, quarried in Wisconsin. Caldwell, an architectural modernist, tolerated the building though he felt it was coo heavy for the site and of little architectural value. Buchsbaum felt he was creating a "picturesque, distinctive building" and that its playful allusion co a castle or a lighthouse were appropriate for the setting.

After 193 7, the area received various small improvements. Benches were erected in 1938. Boulders called for in Caldwell's plan were set in place in March, 1939. Also in that year, the David Wallach Memorial, a bronze sculpture of a resting fawn set on a marble fountain, was dedicated. Little is known about David Wallach who, at his death in 1894 left a bequest for a fountain in a park for "man and beast." True co his wish, the monument has a drinking fountain at ground level which has been enjoyed by generations of local beasts.

In the late 1930's and 40's, the Shelter became a busy center for square dances, scout meetings and other activities. In 1953, the U.S. Army leased land from the Park District for a Nike missile base on a Jackson Park meadow. Soon afterward, it cook pare of the Point for a radar site. The towers stood south of the fieldhouse on a large tract surrounded by a barbed wire fence. One of the cowers reached 150 feet in height, and all of chem dwarfed the turret of the fieldhouse.

Many neighborhood residents resented the radar cowers, but protests became vocal only in the Vietnam era. After the cowers finally came down in 1971, there

A concert at the fieldhouse, 1980's.

was a victory rally with the slogan, "We've won our Point!"

For its 50th anniversary in 1987, a group of landscape architects carefully surveyed the Point, comparing the original features executed under Caldwell with the landscape of today. Though few of the original shrubs and trees remain, and lake damage has badly_eroded the perimeter, the basic features and open spirit of the design can be seen. Park District officials and the public, recognizing the place of Promontory Point in Chicago's past and its value in the present, should work co restore, for future generations, chis historic prairie landscape on the lake.

Summer 2001

PHOTOGRAPHS AND FILMS SOUGHT

Beach Street Educational Films is making a movie about World War 11 servicemen who were refugees from Germany and Austria during the 30s and 40s. Because Hyde Park received many of these refugees, the film makers have asked the Society for help. Julia Rath, producer of the film, would like to have pictures from that time of any such refugees who served in the armed forces during the war. You can reach her at 847-677-6018, or email at JWRath@netzero.net, if you have questions.

JACKSON PARK BEACH ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Looking north from about 56th Street one can see narrow breakwaters that once stood where Promontory Point would be built out into the lake.

Summer 2001

CALDWELL WITH HIS STUDENTS-Ill CATALYST, SUMMER 1998

ABOUT ALFRED CALDWELL

By Stephen A. Treffman

Alfred Caldwell, the landscape designer of Promontory Point, was a poet, landscape architect, civil engineer, city planner, philosopher and distinguished professor. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1903. lo 1909 his family moved to Chicago. He attended Ravenswood Elementary School and Lake View High School, where he became fascinated by the study of botany and Latin. After a brief but unhappy stint in the landscape architecture program at the University of Illinois, Caldwell managed to land a job in 1924 as an assistant to Jens

J eosen, the highly respected Chicago landscape architect. Jensen would ultimately characterize Caldwell as a "genius." In 1927, Caldwell befriended and was profoundly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The onset of the Depression broke up Jensen's firm and from 1931 to 1934, Caldwell was in private practice as a landscape architect. From 1934 to 1936 he served Dubuque, Iowa as its Superintendent of Parks and created the renowned Eagle Point Park there. He returned to Chicago in 1936 to join the Chicago Park District as a landscape designer. It was during this period that he worked out the design for Promontory Point and planned the Lily Pool and Rookery in Lincoln Park. lo the course of this work he

met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who later played a major role in the evolution of Caldwell's-career.

Caldwell left the Park District to join the U.S. War Department in 1940 and worked as a civil engineer on the design and construction of several military training posts. At the end of the war, Mies called upon Caldwell to join the architecture faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1945 IIT awarded

Caldwell a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture and, in 1948, a Master of Science degree in City Planning. His major collaborative work with Mies was as the landscape designer for the UT campus. He abruptly resigned from IIT in 1960 in protest of Mies' ouster as official architect of the school.

From 1960 to 1964 Caldwell was employed by the Chicago Planning Commission. He returned to higher education as a Visiting Professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and later that year was appointed Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California, retiring in 1973. He maintained a private practice until 1981 when he rejoined IIT as the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Professor of Architecture. Proclaimed the last of the Prairie School landscape architects, he died at his home in Bristol, Wisconsin in 1998.

Caldwell's plans for the landscaping of Promontory Point were very precise. Each tree and shrub was carefully located and designated by its proper Latin ► C,

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..,; name. Not usually recognized is that his plans included not only the area popularly considered the Point, that is, the land east of the South Outer (Leif Ericson) Drive at 55th Street, but also the park areas on the west side of the Drive from about 5450 to

5555 South Shore Drive. Parenthetically, it is at 5530- 32 South Shore Drive that the Mies designed, and aptly named, Promontory Apartments now stands.

Although many changes in the landscaping in this area have occurred since Caldwell's day, a few trees surviving from his original planting some 65 years ago can still be found, the largest number of them probably along South Shore Drive. The lake has undermined

the base of the limestone revetment around the Point to the extent that, at some spots, gaps large enough to

swallow a small child have emerged between some of the seawall's stone blocks. llli1

Sources on Caldwell: The standard source, including an extensive bibliography, is Dennis E. Domer, ed., Alfred Caldwell: The Life and Work of a Prairie School Landscape Architect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1997). Darner's obituary for Caldwell may be found in the IIT Catalyst (Summer, 1998). See also Werner Blaser, Architecture and Nature: The Work of Alfred Caldwell (Basil and Boston: Birhauser Verlag, 1984). The Art Institute of Chicago library has a

An Historical Exhibit of

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF CHICAGO

at the

Hyde Park Historical Society

5529 S. Lake Park

Saturdays and Sundays through the summer 2pm-4pm

Photos, documents and objects from the beginnings of the International House movement to the present.

transcript of a lengthy interview conducted with Caldwell.

Summer 200(

Looking Back A Bit...

May. 1888

HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE

"Studies of the Great West - Chicago"

by Charles Dudley Warner,

Washington Park, with a slightly rolling surface and beautiful landscape gardening, has nor only fine driveways, bur a splendid road set apart for horsemen. This is a dirt road, always well sprinkled, and rhe equestrian has a chance besides of galloping over springy turf. Water is now so abundantly provided that the park is kept green in rhe driest season. From anywhere on the south side one may mount his horse or enter his carriage for a turn of fifteen or twenty miles on what is equivalent to a country'road, that is to say, an English country road.

On the lake side of the park are the grounds of the Washington Park Racing club, with a splendid track and stables and other facilities which, I am told, exceed anything in the country of the kind. The clubhouse itself is very handsome and commodious, is open to members and their families summer and winter, and makes a favorite rendezvous for that pare of society which shares its privileges. Besides its large dining and dancing halls, it has elegant apartments set apart for ladies. In winter its hospitable rooms and big wood fires are very attractive after a zero drive.

The city is rich in a few specimens of private houses by Mr. Richardson ...so simple so noble, so full of comfort, sentiment, unique, having what may be called a charming personality. As to interiors, there has been plenty of money spent in Chicago in mere show, but, after all, I know of no other city that has more character and individuality in its interiors, more evidences of personal refinement and taste due, I

imagine mainly to the taste of the women, for while there are plenty of men who have taste, there are very few who have the leisure to indulge it.

Along the Michigan Avenue water front and down the lake shore to Hyde Park, on the Illinois Central and the Michigan Central and their connections, the foreign and local trains pass incessantly (I believe over sixty a day)...and further down, the tracks run between Jackson Park and Washington Park, crossing at grade the 500 feet wide boulevard, which connects these great parks and makes them one.

These tracks and trains are a serious evil and

danger, and the annoyance is increased by the multiplicity of street railways and the swiftly running cable cars, which are a constant threat to the

tim_id....In time the railroads must come in on elevated viaducts...

September 24. I 942

HYDE PARK HERALD

At last, it has happened! The Chicago Beach Hotel, probably the most famous of Chicago's many hostelries, has been commandeered by the U.S. Government for use as a base hospital. Federal Judge Michael Igoe signed a court order which was served upon the hotel corporation yesterday authorizing the

U.S. Army to take possession. Meantime Stephen Clark, manager of the hotel, is organizing an information bureau for the benefit of guests who must seek new housing. The 300 families will have about 30 days in which to find accommodations.

Many have been living in the hotel since it was opened in 1920 and others were occupants of the original Chicago Beach Hotel, built in 1893 and razed after the present building was completed.

October 14. 1887

HYDE PARK HERALD

Weather permitting, the Nickle Plate baseball nine plays with the Pullman's Plate nine tomorrow afternoon on the latter's grounds. The Herald wishes to inform rhe Nickle Plate nine, that if they want to be fortunate again in having ladies as spectators at any of their future games, that they should cease their profane and disgraceful language while in the field, as they used while playing the Prairie Kings last Saturday, at which occasion a number of ladies were present. If you desire the interest of the people you must act like gentlemen.

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A frisbee player enjoys the Point despite the radar towers which the U.S. Army maintained there from 1953-1971.

HYDE PARK AT

THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II:

CAMPUS REMINISCENCES

By Yaffa Claire Draznin

Every memoir is inevitably a Rashomon narrative, more revealing of the teller's perspective than of history as it really happened. This recollection of the experiences my husband Julius and I had as students on the Chicago campus is no exception. Admittedly it only covers about three years, from early 1941 until August 1944-and is selective, with no discussion of faculty activity (about which we knew nothing) nor administration plans for the new B.A. plan, nor activities in the greater Hyde Park community. No matter: chis is our story.

1941. We came on the campus separately. Julius drifted onto the campus in early 1941, having attended Wright Junior College for a year and subsequently joining the American Friends Service Committee in its work camps throughout the Midwest. He hung around, as he tells it, seeking out guys he knew from Tuley High, and at some point decided to became a student himself. After passing the entrance exam but with literally no money at the time, he got his education by the "low cost" method permitted then, by enrolling for as many courses as he could afford and studying independently (following the syllabus without actually attending classes), taking only the final exam that determined his grade. (He was finally admitted for both undergraduate and graduate courses in January 1942.)

Since he had helped stare cooperatives among field workers and sharecroppers while with the Friends, he looked for, and joined, the men's housing co-op at 52nd and Ellis. My introduction to the U. of

C. in early '41 was more conventional. I came to Chicago as a transfer student from the University of Wisconsin and went directly into the political science division, while taking up residence in a university owned and tightly supervised off-campus facility for female students in the 5800 block of Drexel.

It was an ominous time, chose months before Pearl Harbor, although it's hard now to fully recapture the urgency and anxiety chat laced our lives then. The horrendous news from Europe, now totally overrun by the Germans, had us glued to our radios deep into the night, and we woke each morning to broadcasts from London, ►@

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hearing Edward R. Morrow and Charles

budgets and many of us happily became part of what

Collingwood describe the devastation from the Luftwaffe bombs that had rained down upon it the previous night. Our days were filled with continuous, contentious bull-sessions on the morality and ramifications of the war and whether the U.S. should declare war on Germany. (Japan, known only as an Axis partner, was hardly given a thought.)

Campus politics in those days reflected a conflicted nation and opposing political messages, with the America-First isolationist sentiment being espoused despite (or perhaps because of) the gradual and increasing shift in our national economy to a war footing, to provide lend-lease aid to Great Britain, the remaining unoccupied democracy in Europe. As students we knew of the concentration camps but were unaware then, as was the nation, of their' eventual horrific purpose as death camps and of the Final Solution planned for the Jews of Europe. We were equally unaware of the secret research going on in America, especially on our campus, in the field of nuclear fission, eventually leading to the development of the atomic bomb.

We (our crowd) were generally anti-war activists of the Socialist Party ilk, rallying around that popular social science instructor Maynard Krueger, the vice presidential candidate on the Socialist Party ticket headed by Norman Thomas. Of course, we ins1sted that our pacifism was different from the vitriolic isolationism of Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters, and as it happened, even our university president, Robert M. Hutchins, was vehemently anti war. Early in 1941, according co the Daily Maroon, he appeared on the American Town Hall of the Air, with Col. William Donavon (later of OSS fame) co debate the question, "Should we do whatever is necessary to insure a British victory?" Hutchins cook the negative position. The paper didn't say who won the debate.

But we had no difficulty separating ourselves from the pro-Communist fellow-travelers of the American Students Union who, up until June 22, 1941, were also vicriolically against the war in Europe ("The British are as fascist as the Germans and Italians!"). But in a single day after that date, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Unioh, the organization made a 180-degree about-face and changed its line in the blink of an eye to rabid support of every war preparedness effort taken or envisioned, denouncing any labor union which even contemplated strike action, screaming "Defeat Fascism" with abandon.

But while we talked and argued about the war constantly, more mundane living adjustments occupied much of our time. The high cost of living was a pressing constant for those of us on limited

was then a growing student cooperative movement, seen as one solution co the problem of finding affordable room and board.

In 1941, a two-story stone building on the northwest corner of 56th and Ellis already housed an eating cafeteria on the ground floor, a consumer cooperative governed by the democratic Rochdale Principles. There students could, after paying a minimum membership fee, eat lunch and dinner at prices cheap enough co fit into even the most skimpy living allowance.

On the second floor of chat building was the Ellis Housing Co-op, also a consumer cooperative, which men (only) could join and rent a single or double sleeping room for very low cost. (In a Maroon article in 1943, Ellis Co-op rents were quoted as from $8.50 co $11.50 a week; in '41, they muse have been less.)

A third cooperative four blocks co the north, at 52nd and Ellis, the University Housing Co-op, provided more housing for men. Julius lived there, tending the furnace and doing houseman chores in exchange for a free room.

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1941, a group of women decided it was their turn. With the ready assistance of the men from both housing co-ops (not an insignificant incentive), they organized a women's housing co-op. rheard about the group after the initial planning and furniture accumulation was already done -but did manage co be in the first group of women who moved into Woodlawn House at 5711 Woodlawn that fall. As such, we made long since-forgotten history by not only founding the first women's co-op on campus but, after the first quarter, becoming the first women's housing available on the University of Chicago campus run sans housemother.

In 1941, men were registering for the peace-rime draft, faculty members were leaving for Washington for duty with the newly formed defense agencies, and refugee celebrities from Europe flooded the campus, co lecture and co work, beg, exhort us all to save their shattered compatriots in Europe. One such was Jan Maseryk, the son of the man who founded Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, who, having escaped the Nazis, became a political science lecturer on campus. (When the war ended, he returned triumphantly co a free Czechoslovakia and was elected president of the country, only co have his country invaded by the Russians and he himself murdered by the Communists, who replaced the Nazis in occupying his country in post-war Europe.)

The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the declaration of war against Japan and its Axis partners, Germany and Italy, stunned us all. From

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then on, our lives were irrevocably altered.

1942. The exodus of men from the campus became precipitous chat year, as draft boards called draftees up for military service. In spring 1942, four of us students traveled to the University of Minnesota as delegates to a student co-op conference where, unexpectedly, I was elected president of the newly formed Midwest Federation of Campus Cooperatives. This had nothing to do with my sterling qualifications but came about because the men decided that, since they were off to war, some woman or other had better take over.

Surprisingly, a fairly large contingent of men were still around, not called up by the draft -and some fifteen or more of them lived in the University Co-op where Julius had a room. My husband-to-be was generally too busy to take much notice of their activities since, besides carrying a full academic load and working as co-op houseman, he also worked as a night watchman at Michael Reese. But it was fun to speculate what kind of job those guys were doing down at the physics labs (they were absolutely mum about it) because, as he told me, they used to come home looking like coal miners, their clothes covered with what looked like layers of carbon and graphite. The last was the operative distinction. As we later found out, they were constructing graphite bricks for the atomic pile.

My husband and I became engaged late that spring, holding off marriage plans until he heard the results of his draft physical. When in early 1942 Julius was rejected for active service (because, as he himself knew in depressing detail, he was still suffering regular attacks from an active seven-year malarial infection he had contracted while with the Friends in southern Missouri), we set our marriage for late December 1942.

The war was now an integral part of campus life, the visible armed forces in the Quads seeming to multiply geometrically. Soldiers in crisp tan uniforms marched about, singing in cadence, members of the ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program), being trained (we found out lacer) for language and engineering tasks to be used on some unspecified duty in Europe during or after the war. Sailors were also everywhere; according to the Daily Maroon, some t>OO of them, signal corps trainees, were being bunked in Sunny Gym and fed, en masse, in the Ida Noyes Cloister Club.

Buildings were being renovated in odd and obscure ways. Eckhart Hall had had a double stairway leading up to the second-floor library, but suddenly, one day, only a single staircase was visible, climbing to the floor above. On the other side, where a stairway should have been, was simply a wall, the same color

as the other, showing signs of wear and student ► Gt

fall 200

-<@} fingermarks along it --except that it hadn't been there the week before.

Ryerson was also off limits, more or less. An article on the history of Ryerson Hall in the Maroon mentioned vaguely that its Physical Laboratory was being used by the army for experimental purposes, and a librarian was quoted as saying she couldn't get near the place to get some books she needed.

In the summer of 1942, while Julius was taking classes, working on an NYA work-study grant and mopping floors at the eating co-op, I took a job in the defense industry, traveling to the Western Electric plant on 22nd and Cermak, which had stopped making telephones and started making radios for the Navy. As an inspector of radio condensers that came off an assembly line, I received the princely wage (almost twice that of the solderers on the line) of 51 cents an hour.

Julius's NYA job turned out to be the instrument that breached the tightest security system on the campus. He was working for Buildings & Grounds at the time, B&G being the department that took care of everything mechanical and nonacademic on the campus, including campus policing. On a day when the head janitor was out of the office, a phone call came through about a fire in one of the dorms.

Someone shoved a piece of paper into his hand with the janitor's name on it and told him: "Go find this man, and fast!"

Hurrying from one building to another, Julius entered Eckhart where, after checking through empty halls, he spotted a door off on the side. There was no one about. Facing a stairwell he followed it down into a sub-basement, stepping out into what appeared to be a laboratory, with tables of equipment. At one of the tables, looking at him in shock and horror, stood one of his co-op housemates.

"What are you doing here!" the man said. "Who let you in? Nobody's allowed down here!"

Apparently the unlocked door he had passed through led into the security Holy of Holies, the labyrinth of halls, labs and rooms that ended up under the west stands of Stagg Field where, on December 2, 1942 (as we learned much later), a group of young physicists, including many from the co-op, leaned against the walls sipping lab-distilled grain alcohol from paper cups, toasting each other and the occasion, and shared with Enrico Fermi a quiet celebration of the birth of the first controlled, sustained nuclear reaction.

1943. On e we were married, we moved out of our respective co-op houses and set up housekeeping in what passed for neighborhood student housing, first on Maryland Ave. (communal bath and toilet in the

hall, 211 cockroaches in the kitchen), then on 55th and Blackstone (listening to the one-nighters scream obscenities at each other on the stairs). We continued to eat most of our meals at the Ellis Co-op where we were regularly reminded to turn in our sugar rationing and meat-rationing food stamps, since food couldn't be bought without them.

That spring, my husband became the co-op's full time paid manager and spent every minute he could (when not thinking of class work), trying to keep the operation afloat, worrying about how to pay the help and buy food with few funds. The number of paying students plummeted with the shrinkage of men on campus -and by summer the co-op could no longer keep operating. It was Julius's unhappy duty to shut it down: selling the furniture, the kitchen equipment, the #10 cans of tomatoes and carrots that had accumulated in the basement, the lot. What money was finally salvaged was put into a trust fund supervised by willing faculty members (Maynard

Patterns to help keep the GI warm. Designed for men of action. Colors include: Khaki, Navy, Maroon, Lt Oxford, Oxford Grey, and Air Force Blue.

J: .. I I 2 o o

Krueger was one), later used to help new co-ops get started after the war.

The male-drain became especially noticeable among the faculty in 1943. As a political science student, I remember that, in the last two terms before I graduated, the department was literally denuded of instructors. Of the eight courses I took, only one was taught by the instructor listed in the catalog. All the rest were foisted on Prof. Jerome Kerwin who stepped in to teach them all (for which I was extremely grateful), after the designated instructors left for Washington or the armed forces.

After graduation in 1943, I became co-breadwinner and looked around for work. My only nonacademic skill being typing, I first took an office job at the Central States Cooperative (the regional distributor to the eight or more consumer cooperative groceries in the Chicago area) and then, closer to campus, at "1313" across the Midway with the American Public Works Association, earning a normal typist salary, about $25 a week.

In the fall of 1943, with the luck of the nonlrish, we were accepted as members of Concord House, one of

the most unusual and exciting experiments in co operative living in Hyde Park.

The house was a majestic three-story Victorian mansion, with grounds, at 5200 S. Hyde Park Blvd. (where Rodfei Zedek Congregation now stands). It had a magnificent living room with a fireplace, a large dining room, and full institutional kitchen, with dozens of sleeping rooms. A Dr. Jay Jump, a dentist, was the directing force in the House; he may even have been the actual owner of the property, with the co-operative renting on a long-term lease.

The governance of the House was, again, based on the consumer-cooperative Rochdale Principles: democratic control, nondiscrimination in all areas but especially in terms of race and politics, and a co operative sharing of household chores and financial responsibilities. All members, students and nonstudents alike, were accepted through a vote of the residents.

I seem to remember only one paid employee, the cook; but I wonder whether we didn't also pay someone to be the administrator of what was a rather complicated room-and-board arrangement. While each person was responsible for her or his own sleeping quarters, the cleaning of the communal areas, food preparation, laundry, and house-operating chores were shared by all the residents, allocated among them through a complicated and detailed work schedule, rigorously enforced. Among the jobs on the work schedule was the planting, weeding, and tending of a huge Victory Garden plot at the north end of the block (near the Fifth Army headquarters) that furnished the bulk of the vegetables ending up on our dinner table.

As part of the Hyde Park community, we participated in all the civil-defense activities required. We turned in our sugar and meat food stamps, collected flattened tin cans, saved congealed beef and bacon fat for use in the manufacture of munitions, and participated in the regular citywide air raid drills.

When the citywide sirens went off, we all were told to pull down the window shades, put out all lights, and gather on the ground floor near the stairs to the basement, earlier prepared for use in the eventuality of a bombing. Many of us regarded it as a lark, and a contingent of pacifists living in the house were reluctant participants; but the two European refugees living in the House at the time, Bert Hozelitz and Fred Lister, were designated Air Raid Wardens in charge of the exercise. They had had enough bitter personal experience with war to insist, with vehemence, that we obey the routine to the letter. And we did.

1944: In spring, my husband was notified that ►(i}

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• his job application co the National Labor Relations Board was being considered-and from then on. we existed, in penury but with hope, chat an

By then it was obvious chat my office job wasn't earning us enough co cover our expenses. Finding chat war work paid higher wages, I cook a job at Carnegie Illinois Steel in South Chicago. Despite the asphyxiation-level of hydrogen sulphide (the "roccen eggs" odor) chat inundated the steel mills, the pay was generous. Ac first I was assigned a job in a labor crew, shoveling sand out of box cars (at 63 cents an hour), one of a contingent of women being hired at the mill. (lo World War I, black men finally broke the job barrier in the steel industry; in World War II, the same thing happened for females, white or black.) I was the only Anglo among a crew of 15 Hispanic women sand-shovelers but eventually, possibly because of my conspicuous presence, someone decided chat I might be better used elsewhere.,I was promoted to work in the chemistry lab and paid $1.03/hr.

Concord House in 1944 came under heavy community censure because of our nondiscriminatory admission policy. The local Chamber of Commerce was unremitting in castigating us for lowering property values by admitting nooCaucasian co live there.

We also were seen as a subversive element because of the large number of Japanese-Americans who lived in the House. Many apparently had heard about Concord House while still in internment camps and, after they were released, came co live with us for a while before making more permanent plans elsewhere.

In lace summer of chat year, Julius was notified chat he was accepted as an entry-level professional field examiner for the NLRB (at the munificent salary of

$2,000 per annum) and we left the campus in August, 1944, for his government assignment in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cii1

MY FIRST TRIP TO HYDE PARK

By Carol Bradford

My family always took a vacation in August, after the oat crop was harvested and before school started. Often we went to Duluth, Minnesota, where my father could gee relief from hay fever. Other times we went west to the Black Hills or to Colorado, where my mother had a cousin. But in 1957 we broke with tradition and went east for the first time.

We left our South Dakota farm early on the morning of August 15. My father drove'our 1952 Ford across Iowa. We stopped en route co visit relatives and then went on co Dubuque. There we visited the University, where my grandfather had attended seminary and I later attended college. The

next day we drove to Chicago, spending the night at a motel in one of the western suburbs.

My parents' diary for Saturday, August 17 reads "Very nice in Chic, went to airport, went thru big French plane, saw amphitheatre, stockyards. Most of day in museum. Took boat ride on lake tonite." Was that a busy day or what? As usual, my parents had checked AAA guidebooks and other sources and decided what they wanted to see in the city. We stopped first at Midway Airport. I don't know why we didn't go into the terminal, but we did stop at an Air France hangar off Cicero Avenue and saw some of the large planes there. We probably went straight east on 55th Street, making a stop along the way at the stockyards area, and then on to the Museum of Science and Industry.

What an awesome place it was for all of us! My brother, David, a year younger than I, and my sister Nancy, 8 years old, were fascinated with everything. We went to the coal mine, the submarine, and all the other exhibits. "Yesterday's Main Street" was a favorite and of course we had to get our picture taken on the antique car. I was thrilled to find that picture once again a few months ago among my parent's many photo albums.

That night we stayed at one of the old Hyde Park hotels. How I wish that my parents would have written down the name of it in their diary. I remember it as a dark building, not far from the Museum. We had a room with a Murphy bed, which I had never seen before.

We stayed in Chicago three more days. We got a

room at the Hamilton Hotel downtown, which had been recommended to us by a friend in Dubuque. We went to the Aquarium, the Board of Trade, the Merchandise Mart, Buckingham Fountain, and the top of the Prudential Building (which was the tallest in the city at that time). We shopped on State Street and rode the Ravenswood "el" to the end of the line and back downtown. On our last afternoon, we went to a White Sox double-header against the Washington Senators. We left shortly after the scare of the second game, so as to get a good rest before starting home the next morning. Lacer, we learned that we had missed a no-hitter, won by the Senators.

On August 21, we left Chicago at 5:15 A.M. We

drove west on Highway 30 across Illinois and Iowa. From Chicago co our home is a distance of about 600 miles. By 6:30 P.M. we were back in South Dakota at the home of my older sister, Helen, who had just married earlier that year. We stopped there co celebrate her birthday.

I didn't imagine during that trip chat I would spend most of my life in Hyde Park, but I will always cherish the memory of chat first special visit here. Cli1

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In this issue ...

• Author and fellow Hyde Parker, Yaffa Claire Draznin, writes of life in Hyde Park during World War 11. Her latest book, Victorian London's Middle Class Housewife-What She Did All Day came out in November of last year.

• HPHS board member and occasional contributor to this newslette, Carol Bradford, writes of her first experience of Hyde Park. We are most grateful to both of these contributors.

MY SCHOOL DAYS IN HYDE PARK

HPHS President Alice Schlessinger, formerly editor of LAB NOTES, U-High'sjourna!, has suggested that Society members might be interested in the recollections of Pal{/ H. Nitze, class of 1923, recollections he wrote for that j011rna! in I 985.

In 1910 my father was asked by President Harper to join the faculty of the University of Chicago as head of the Department of Romance Languages and

Literature. We moved from Berkeley, California, to the Del Prado Hotel on 59th Street, on the lakeshore side of the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, in the fall of that year. I remember it as being a glorious place with high ceilings, sunny rooms, an enormous veranda with rocking chairs.

I was three; I had a friend who was four and much more grown up. I admired him immensely. Emily Kimborough, in her book about growing up in Chicago, has an amusing description of us staying at the Del Prado Hotel-the Nitze family, their charming daughter Pussy, and their spoiled, objectionable brat of a son. I am sure she reports accurately. Pussy was in second grade in the elementary school while I was being a pest around the hotel. The next year we moved to a house on what was

then Blackstone Avenue between 57th and 58th Streets.

That summer our mother took us to Fish Creek, Wisconsin, to escape the heat of the Chicago summer. We drove up with the Guenzels, friends of my parents, in a glorious red Stanley Steamer. The roads north along Sturgeon Bay were merely two ruts with grass growing

between them. Every ten miles or so the boiler would over-heat and blow the safety valve. Mr. Guenzel would have to climb under the car and insert a new one.

Father stayed behind in the Blackstone Avenue house with a fellow member of his department, Clarence Parmenter, both of them having opted to teach for the summer quarter. Father could become so intent on what he was talking about that he could be absent-minded. Parmenter wrote Mother a letter describing Father pouring maple syrup on his head while he scratched the breakfast pancakes.

The year 1912 we spent in Europe, where Father was doing research on the Grail Romances. When we came back to Chicago, we moved to 1220 56th Street,

between Kimbark and Woodlawn.

In 1914 Father again took us all to Europe. ►@

-<O We were mountain climbing in Austria when the Arch-Duke was murdered in Sarayevo. Father became worried when Austria mobilized against Russia and decided co take us co a safe country,-Germany. We arrived in Munich on the morning Germany declared war on Russia and World War I began. We finally got back to the United States by a Holland-American liner during the battle of the Marne.

It was not until 1915 that I became a regular student at the Elementary School. My life there did not start off easily. My mother was ahead of her generation in many things. She smoked, loved to dance, entertained with gusto, had an enormous circle of friends, but she was also a romantic. She insisted on dressing me in short pants and jacket ancl a shire with a Buster Brown collar and a flowing black tie tied in a bow.

At school, at ten o'clock every morning, we had a break for roughhousing and letting off steam. Every day one of my classmates, Percy Boynton, would say insulting things about my get-up. I felt obliged to hit him, whereupon he would beat me up. This went on for a time until I found a way co solve the problem: one night I took all my collars, tore chem into pieces, and threw them out my bedroom window into the alley. The next day I went down to breakfast without a collar. My mother asked me, "Why no collar?" When

I explained, her only comment was, "I had no idea you felt so strongly about them."

But my problem was not restricted to my classmates. In order to get to the Elementary School, I had to pass Ray School , the public school between

56th and 57th. One afternoon, walking home from school, I stopped to watch some Ray School boys playing marbles. One of them stood up and asked me what I was looking at. When my answer was not to his satisfaction, he pushed me back over one of his

friends who was kneeling behind me. Then they beat me up.

I found out that my tormentors were members of the Musik brothers gang. They were the sons of a tailor down on 55th and considered themselves bosses of the entire area bounded by Woodlawn and Kimbark, 55th and 56th Streets. The neighboring block on the ocher side of Kim bark was dominated by

che Scotti brothers gang. The eldest Scotti offered to defend me against the Musiks. I became an enthusiastic member of his gang. He was thin, almost emaciated, slightly red-haired; he was my first experience of charismatic leadership. He had a technique of binding the loyalty of members of his gang by getting chem co become his partners in.some outrageous act. One day he suggested that the workmen who were building some houses on the ocher

side of 56th Street usually left their toolbox on the site

overnight. He told me we could use chose tools. That night, without a second thought, I lifted the tools and handed chem over to him.

There was a third gang on the block between 57th

and 58th run by the Colissimo brothers. On weekends we would sometimes have football games between the gangs on the Midway. One team or other would grossly cheat and the game would break up into a free for-all fight. Years later, after I had gone east co school

and college, but had come back to Chicago for a vacation, I asked about the Musiks, the Scotties and the Colissimos. They had been caught up in the more serious gang life of those days in Chicago and had been either killed of jailed. None of them were known to have survived as useful citizens.

The South Side of Chicago contained many different worlds. One was the University world inspired by President Harper, one of the great men of his day. In physics the stars were Michaelson, who lived on 58th

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Street. Professor Milliken lived across the street from us on 56th. Glen Milliken was in the class ahead of me, but undertook to lead me into the world of science, its theory, its experiments and practice. West

of us lived Professor Dixon, a Nobel Prize winning mathematician. One block to the East lived James Weber Lynn, one of the srars of the English department. James Breasted, the famous historian of Egypt and the ancient world, lived on Woodlawn.

Others that I remember were Thorstein Veblen, the economise, Gordon Laing, the classicist, and Thomas, the sociologist. The University Medical School attracted a distinguished group of doctors, including Dr. Sippy who lived on Woodlawn. The Sippys were the only people we knew who had an automobile. In fact, they had two. Everyone else, to get downtown, would walk the eight blocks to the Illinois Central Station and take the train.

There was also a distinguished Jewish business community that lived around 47th Street or even closer to town. They included the Rosenwalds, the Mandels, the Blocks, the Gidwitzes and the Feuchtwangers. One of the Feuchtwangers ended up as the distinguished moving picture director, Walter Wanger. There were newspaper people, artists and lawyers. Finally there were a number of not so distinguished people, but people who seemed to

represent the real world, the Chicago of those days. That real world was physically represented by the soot from the South Chicago steel mills and the odor of the stockyards which would blow at us whenever the wind

was from the west. The Ray School and Western High with its 4000 students, twenty-five percent of whom were black, seemed to me to be the real world of Chicago in those days. James Farrell's Studs Lonigan presents an accurate picture of chat world._

Athletics was, of course, very much a part of our lives. I played soccer, basketball and baseball, with vigor but no brilliance. The school organized a variety of activities to widen our experience. On various weekends we were taken to visit one of the steel mills, then one of the meat packing plants in the stockyards, then the Standard Oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, then a paint factory and the factory where they assembled the Essex automobile, a brand long since abandoned.

We were members of a Boy Scout group doing our daily good deeds. We sold War Bonds in 1917. We acted out current events. We acted in plays, learned to cook, to set type, to use wood and metal lathes and ocher machine tools, and to knit. It was an advanced and experimental form of education. I guess it did most of us no harm and for many it opened up larger horizons. There were, however, gaps. I learned no American history and I never learned to spell, bur that was undoubtedly my fault, not the school's. I just wasn't interested in spelling. For some, however, the school did not provide the proper discipline.

In my second year at U High, I found myself sitting at an adjoining desk to Dicky Loeb in a French course. Dicky was older and in the class ahead of us. He seemed to me to be charming but soft. During the

final examination I noticed that he was cribbing from what I was writing.

Nevertheless I was shocked when it came out chat he had joined Leopold in the infamous murder of the Frank boy.

I have lefr out one important aspect of those years, the impact of World War I upon our emotions and our thoughts. The Nitze family is entirely of German ancestry. Until the war, I had spent about half of my life abroad, much of it in Germany. The people

I had known in chose pre-war years in Germany, and also in Italy and Austria, were warm, loving, and much more emotional and outgoing than my contemporaries in Chicago, particularly those who were not part of the University enclave. My family was firmly on the side of "Keep America out of the War."►G)

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...:C) In 1917, when the United States entered the war, we switched our views, but doubts remained. My classmates and I were asked to call at houses in our neighborhood and try to sell Liberty bonds. I was utterly surprised when a number of those I called on agreed to buy them. I sold $5000 worth of bonds which seemed to me to be an enormous amount.

But even at the age of ten and eleven the unutterable tragedy of the battle of the Somme, of the continuous struggle for Verdun and the mysterious battles on the Eastern front left a lasting impression. When President Wilson announced his Fourteen Points it seemed that a gleam of hope had appeared in

a destructive and irrational world. When the armistice was announced our parents took us to a friend's office high up above Michigan Avenue from which we could watch the parade. But later when the surrender terms and the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty were announced, I felt bitterly disillusioned. In our current events class we acted out the signing of the Versailles Treaty. I was given the role of Walter Rathenau, who signed for the Germans. Later, Keynes' "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" confirmed my worst suspicions of that treaty.

By 1923, I had accumulated enough credits to have a chance at being accepted at the University that fall. Father wisely decided that this was a bad idea; I was not only too young, but a University professor's son. He correctly judged that I would not be accepted as an equal so he sent me off to Hotchkiss for two years of growing up. There I didn't learn that much that I hadn't already been exposed to at U-High, but I did have a chance to catch up in maturity-whatever that means-with my peers.

Paul Nitze went on to serve in various roles in the U.S. government-among them: as Vice Chairman of the US Strategic Bombing Survey (1944-46), for the State Department (1950-53), as Secretary of the Navy (1963- 67), as Assistant Secretary of Defense (1973-76), and was named special advisor to the President on Arms Control in 1984. For over forty years, he was one of the chief architects of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.

On January 19, 2001, just one week before his 94th birthday, the USS Nitze was named for him "to sail around the world and to remind us of the contribution you have made to our country"-so said William Cohen,

Secretary of Defense. mII

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To The Point·

From the HPHS Newsletter, February, 1982 Muriel Beadle reports on a talk by Ezra Sensibar

It was in 1913 that Marshall Field gave $4 million to erect a natural history museum on the lakefront, on land to be created for that purpose. (Bear in mind that at the time the IC tracks ran on a trestle in the lake all the way from the Promontory to 18th Street, and that there was water 40 ft deep where the Field Museum, now stands.

The initial plan was to fill the site with clay, then cover it with sand. That combination, however, "turned out in actuality to be mush", and it was decided to combine clay and rubbish (collected from Loop offices, stores and streets) and top that with sand.

Once the fill was complete, wooden piles were driven down through it to the former lake bottom, and concrete piers were superimposed on the piles. These piers, which support the basement floor of the museum, rise to a height of 42 feet above the level of the lake and in effect place the museum on a man made hill.

What to do? "The marble was piling up," Mr. Sensibar said. "The architects were tearing their hair. Nobody seemed to know how to solve the problem."

And then a 24 year old Gary, Indiana resident, Jacob Sensibar (Ezra's older brother) had a bright idea. He was no engineer-in fact he was fresh off the farm buthe had eyes and a brain. "Why not lay down the sand the same way a beach is built up-that is mixed with water and deposited gently on the site?" he asked.

The architects decided to try it. Marshall Field loaned young Sensibar $40,000; Jacob bought a boat and equipment and began to pump in sand and water; and his system worked. So it is especially appropriate that the firm he founded has been identified with so many of Chicago's subsequent lakefront construction projects-including Promontory Point.

A page from Cap and Gown

the University of Chicago Yearbook-1903

The Woman's Union

Among all the srudent organizations at the University none as ever been so far reaching in its benefits, so practical in its advantages and so democratic in spirit as the Woman's Union, organized in January, 1902, "to unite the women of the University for the promotion of their common interests." Starring with a mere handful of faithful and enthusiastic workers, including both students and women of the Faculty, the membership has grown to almost four hundred... But the success of the Union is not measured by the length of its registration alone, for the benefits derived from membership are varied and along several lines.

Formerly all women connected with the University who did not live at the halls or near the Campus brought their lunches with them, and the only accommodations for eating them, or for resting were in the cloak rooms and recitation rooms. Now all that is changed. In the Union rooms, which are at Lexington Hall, the new woman's building, lunch is served every day from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m., and for a moderate sum, soup, chocolate, sandwiches, fruit cake and pickles may be obtained.

Other special accommodations are a rest room and reading room, in which may be found the daily paper and all the late magazines. Here, every day, from fifty to a hundred girls meet to eat, and chat, and rest. It is one of the unwritten laws of the Union that no stranger be allowed to eat luncheon alone, so that the Union, while offering material advantages, is also doing a great work along another much needed line. It is fostering and developing a spirit of equality and democracy which gives promise of a bright future...

The girls enjoy not only the advantage of becoming acquainted with each other, but also the privilege of meeting wives of the faculty and other women.

Along business lines the Union has not only been self-supporting, but has to its credit in the bank a sum amounting to $67.73.

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DonJt Forget!

PLEASE JOIN US FOR

THE HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Annual Member's MeeHng

SATURDAY,FEBRUARY23,2002 THE QUADRANGLE CLUB

SPEAKER

Peter Ascoli

TOP IC

My Grandfather, Julius Rosenwald

GATHERING 6PM • DINNER 7PM ELECTION OF OFFICERS CORNELL AWARDS

SPECIAL MESSAGE

Mary Ellen Ziegler and I are creating a website on the Outdoor Public Art (Sculpture and Murals) on the South Side. We would welcome anyone wlth knowledge of the subject to contact us at (773) 288-1242 or at jamulberry@aol.com. Thank you! -Jay Mulberry

and...

MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR

SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 2002 2-4PM

AT OUR HEADQUARTERS

Claude Weil

former resident and staff member

WILL SPEAK ON

International House, Its History and Vision 1932 to the present

AND ENJOY OUR EXHIBIT ON INTERNATIONAL HOUSE COMPILED BY STEVE TREFFMAN, BERT BENADE, CLAUDE WEIL,

DENISE JORGENS, MARTA NICHOLAS AND PATRICIA JOBE

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Looking Back

Some excerpts from PROGRESS, (Newsletter for A Century of Progress) March 29, 1933

Bridge To Be Important Feature Of Entertainment At Exposition

Wing of Hall of Science Designated as Bridge Hall; United States Bridge Association To Direct Activities

Bridge, the pastime of millions, is to be an important feature of entertainment at A Century of Progress. An entire wing of the Hall of Science at the Fair has been designated as Bridge Hall, and the United States Bridge Association has been selected by A Century of Progress as the organization to plan and operate the various Bridge activities at Bridge Hall.

George Reith, Executive Vice president of the Association, announces that there will be an interesting historical exhibit in the tournament hall showing the evolution of bridge and he expects several museum exhibits in this feature.

In addition to daily afternoon and evening play for suitable trophies, there will be featured weekly best score play for valuable prizes such as automobiles, bridge furniture, etc. It is also expected that many sectional tournaments, the winners of which will qualify for the national championships, will be held at the Fair...

The daily sessions will be preceded by half-hour lectures by well-known teachers, and numerous exhibition matches will be held by internationally famous players such as Ely Culbertson, Milton C. Work, Willard Karn, Oswald Jacoby, Theo A. Lightner, Josephine Culbertson, Commander Winfield

A. Liggett, Robert M. Halpin, Louis Haddad and Mr. Reith.

An unusual feature in connection with the lectures and exhibition matches will be the use of an electrical board which will show to a large audience the bidding and play, bib by bid, and play by play, in a dramatically realistic manner.

Chicago and Its History

As Chicago approaches its centenary, more and more interest is being evidenced in the history of the city.

Many little known facts about Chicago mentioned in the new Century of Progress book, "Chicago's Great Century," by Henry Justin Smith, are of interest not only to Chicagoans but to all. Herewith we list some of the "little known facts" of Chicago history from Mr. Smith's book, which, incidentally, is having a wide sale:

The men who organized the town in 1833 were mostly 30 years of age or even younger.

New York had 200,000 population when Chicago had only a few hundred.

At the breaking of ground for the first ship canal, a judge was doused with water for predicting a city of 100,000.

Early citizens protested against theaters as "nurseries of crime."

When the first railroad from Chicago was being financed, a city banker refused it a loan of $20,000.

Cholera killed 931 persons in one month in 1849.

Chicago's White Stockings baseball club had as president in 1869 Potter Palmer. The team defeated Memphis by a score of 15 7 to 1.

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From A Hyde Park Childhood

·:·:·:·:·:

::::: by Dorothy Michelson Livingston :::::

::::: University of Chicago Alumnae Magazine, :::::

::::: Winter, 1979 :::::

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:..:.:.:.:.

"We children attended the Laboratory :::::

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::::: School... I entered there for the first grade :::::

:::::: in 1912. We were taught the nursery ::::::

:::::: rhymes in Latin, and in sixty-eight years I ::::::

:::::: have not forgotten Doniina Maria, tota :::::

:::::: contrarial Quibiti crescit in horto? :::::

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VOL. 24 NOs. 1 & 2

NEW EXHIBIT AT HPHS HEADQUARTERS:

THE FILIPINO AMERICAN COMMUNITY IN HYDE PARK

CONGRATULATIONS! PAUL CORNELL AWARD WINNERS 2002

At the Society's Annual Meeting in February, The Awards

Because the Philippine Islands became an American possession after the Spanish American War, Filipino Emigres-labeled "nationals"- could not acquire full U.S. citizenship until the Philippines gained independence in 1946. From 1900 until 1934 they usually came to America as a source of cheap labor, in jobs earlier reserved for the Chinese (who had been excluded by the "Chinese Exclusion Law").

Those who came to Hyde Park however, often came for educational opportunities; many went back to the

Islands to become professionals and government leaders.

Others, like Florentino Ravelo, stayed here to make a better life. His daughter, Estrella Ravelo Alamar, and her co-author Willi Buhay, have just published their book Images of America, Filipinos in Chicago, a book of photographs and the basis of a new exhibit at HPHS Headquarters which Estrella and Willi have prepared. Our headquarters is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 until 4pm. Be sure to stop by!

Committee, Bert Benade, chairman, Stephen Treffman, and Devereaux Bowley, presented Cornell Awards to:

The University of Chicago for its adaptation of Bartlett Gym while honoring the aesthetic beauty of this historic building

The Jackson Shore Co-op, 5490

S. Shore Drive for staying true to their building's past

The Gustitus Group, Architects, for' helping the Co-op research and restore their building at 5490

The City of Chicago for rebuilding the 47th Street/Outer Drive Bridge-restoring this original Art Deco treasure

From the exhibit All Hyde Parkers, 1930s

The Aloha Islanders Orchestra entertained in Summit, Illinois, on weekends.

L to R-standing: Leo Alfalla, Celestine Alayu, Lawrence Banag; seated: Albert Viernes, A. Soriano

Last fall we published reminiscences of her life in Hyde Park during World War Il by Ya/fa Claire Dre1znin. In this issue we are delighted to be able to present another such remembrance.

LIVI NG IN HYDE PARK DURING WORLD WAR II

by Mary Powell Hammersmith

In the fall of 1944, when my husband's army unit was about to embark for Europe, I returned to Chicago tO live until the end of the war. My parents lived in Hyde Park, as had my father's parent from about 1990, and I had been born there. Ac the time of my return to the city, my brother, Chester B. Powell, a physician then in a neurosurgical residency, and his wife were living with my parents. That meant I would have to find an apartment of my own-no easy accomplishment with war-time shortages.

This was achieved with the help of my sister-in-law who worked in the Loop. She would get the Chicago Tribune as soon as it came off the press, read any for rent ads and call me to give me a number to call. That made me one of-the-first to inquire about an apartment and it worked! The agent, a man with the unlikely name of Leon Sex, told me to come to his

Loop office. I did, and shortly thereafter the apartment on the third floor at 5419 University was mine. Only about six blocks from my parents, ideal for our

sixteen-month-old son and me, close to my brother's home and, as his time was claimed by his medical residency, his wife and I were able to spend much time together.

Because we both liked ice-skating, she borrowed ID cards from two friends who worked at the University. We thought these would get us into the rink under the north stands of Stagg Field. Fortunately for us, the ID cards had no pictures. Even so, it was not easy to get past the gatekeeper. We wondered why such a big deal was made of the simple matter of admitting a couple of women to an ice rink. Noc until after the war did we learn that secret nuclear research was being carried out under the west stands-only those directly involved had any idea of what was caking place there.

Across the hall from my apartment lived a nice young couple with their little boy about the age of my son. His mother and I, our children in strollers, often walked together to the grocery score on 55th Street. I knew her last name but it meant nothing ocher than it

was just that-her name. Then, a few years after the war had ended, our copy of Time magazine arrived on its front cover the picture of our former neighbor. He had been appointed the first head of the Atomic Energy Commission. His name? Glenn Seaborg.

Today, if you enter "Seaborg" as the key word co search che web, you can read about what chis remarkable man achieved in his lifetime. In 1951, at age 39, he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Edwin M. McMillan. Seaborgium is named for him. He helped develop the atomic bomb, was a discoverer of elements 94 through 98 and 101 of che periodic cable. Called the Renaissance Man of the Twentieth Century, no less than 1160 sires on the Google Search Engine list Seaborg. He devoted his lacer years to a program encouraging young people to enter the field of science.

In 1999, shortly after I had read of Seaborg's death, I learned chat our California grandson had won a chemistry contest in high school and the prize had been presented to him by Seaborg. Our grandson was amazed co learn chat Seaborg had lived across the hall

from his grandparents during the war,

Another neighbor who worked on the Manhattan Project, as the work at Stagg Field came to be known, was Walter Zinn who lived with his wife and son and his mother on the north side of 58th Street, just east of Kenwood. At 5741 Kenwood, in the first floor apartment of a three-story gray-stone built at the time of the Columbian Exposition, lived my parents. Their backyard at 5741 was long and narrow and the Zinn apartment's back porch overlooked it. Grandma Zinn and my mother would have occasional neighborly

chats and little Johnny Zinn, her grandson, ofren came over to play with our son when we were visiting my parents.

A sandbox which my father had built pr,ovided hours of entertainment for the two little boys. In ordering the sand, however, we discovered that suppliers would deliver it in a minimum of one cubic yard and, after filling the sandbox, we had a huge surplus. Until you have tried to dispose of that much sand in the city, you cannot comprehend the extent of such a problem. Worst of all, the city notified us that

the sand had to be cleared from the walk before nightfall! I cannot remember how we accomplished it without a car-but we did.

On the floor above my parents lived a woman named Rowena Morse Mann. She said she was a granddaughter of Samuel F. B. Morse-we had no reason to doubt it. Above her lived a group of people including Charlotte Towle, a professor of Psychiatric Social Work at the University. She wrote a book that is a classic in the field, Basic Human Needs. A soft spoken, warm person, she was devoted to her dog and fond of playing poker. With her lived her sister,

Mildred who kept house, their brother, and Mary Rall, who held a high level position with Chicago Catholic Charities. She, too, liked to play poker and often came down with che others for poker sessions with my parents and the rest of us.

Shortages were a big problem for everyone. All sorts of things were rationed-canned goods, shoes, gasoline (unimportant to us because we didn't have a car), even railway travel. Generally only persons in the armed forces, or others connected with war-related work were allowed to travel on trains ocher than local ones. Larger families had ration books for each family member and, as a result, could purchase things more easily-provided the stores had what they wanted.

Canned fruit was scarce. Meat was too. And sugar was a real problem. With only my ration book and our little boy's, I often had to wear old shoes because his feet were growing rapidly and I would have to use my shoe quota for him. I still have one of those rations books.

So many things were rationed on the home front because chose were the very things being sent to the men in the armed forces. When they returned home, they couldn't stand the sight of Spam, canned fruit cocktail, chipped beef, and ocher things we at home had not seen for years! Another scarce commodity, during-and after-the war were nylon stockings. They had just come on the market before the war • broke out and, as nylon was needed for parachutes, they became almost non-existent on the home front. Bue a produce was soon marketed which enabled women co color their legs so as co look as if they had on stockings!

le is hard to describe the total upheaval the war brought to our lives. My husband, a reserve officer, had been called to active duty when he had only eleven hours to go to gee is B. S. in Civil Engineering.

I was in my last semester too, but when he got his first leave, I notified my parents chat we wanted ► e

S 1, r II 9 /Summe 2 0 0 2

«@ to get married. They had only a few days to arrange for our wedding in the Thorndike Hilton Chapel, on 58th, across from the Oriental Institute. Still, friends and family who could get there did making the event all a wedding ought to be. My husband had a few days leave before returning to Ft. Belvoir, south of Alexandria, Virginia, where he was an instructor in the Officers Candidate School (Army Engineers). I did not go with him then because I had promised my parents that I would go back to the University of Illinois to finish my own work. I was able to petition out of the graduation ceremony and joined my husband right after my course work was finished. Our first child was born fifteen months later at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D. C. at about the time casualties from the North Africa Invasion were being brought to the hospital. Civilian patients, even those having first babies, got minimal care.

An event I recall from my days in Hyde Park happened when I was walking along 57th Street toward the IC station. Suddenly a woman who was a total stranger stepped from the door of an apartment building and, in a voice filled with alarm, said, "Roosevelt has died!" My reaction was similar to hers, though nor as strong. I had never been a Roosevelt fan, but he had been president for twelve years and many young people had never known any other president. Some had come to believe that there just was no one else who could take Roosevelt's place.

When the little-known Harry Truman succeeded Roosevelt, people in general feared the worst including me. When he decided to use the atomic bomb on Japan, many were aghast, but not the men who already had served for four years and certainly not the troops being prepared to invade Japan. We wanted our children to grow up with live fathers. We had not provoked the Pearl Harbor attack! We had given a lot but not as much as the families whose sons and husbands would not be returning, like my husband's brother, still listed as missing in action at war's end.

Years later, when captured German war records had

been translated, we learned of his fate. His parents never knew-by that time they were dead.

My view of Harry Truman was totally changed when I saw tbat he had made a hard decision, one that would save American lives, though at terrible cost to the Japanese. Over the years there was considerable criticism of Truman's use of atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but that criticism has not come from children whose

fathers were spared being among those scheduled for an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

In many ways, Hyde Park seems not to have changed over the years. Some things are no more, like my uncle's large frame house that stood on the west side of Kenwood a few doors north of 57th Street. My first recollection of it was when I was about four and was assigned the job of bringing in, on a velvet pillow, the engagement ring of my uncle's step-daughter during her engagement party. After completing my assignment, I retreated to safety under the dining room table.

Today a small neighborhood park has replaced that

house. Next door to the south, in what was the last row house there, my great grandmother (grandmother to my father), Isadore Clark Scott Badollet had died in January, 1914. She had been born in 1828 in Vincennes, Indiana, daughter of John Crockwell Clark, a colorful inn-keeper originally from Winchester, Virginia. Her mother was Susannah McCutcheon, whose brother was an ancestor to John

T. McCutcheon, famous cartoonist with the Chicago Tribune. A few years ago, John T. McCutcheon, Jr. and I arranged ro meet at the Newberry Library ro compare notes on our mutual ancestors.

Among my treasured memories is a cheer which my uncle, Chauncey Powell, attributed to students at Hyde Park High School-a cheer in Latin, possibly corrupted-it's been quite a few years since I learned Latin.

Certior factus. Quamo Brem Exploritoribus, Hastes spem.

Down in a coal mine shoveling smoke Hyde Park High School... Hie, haec hoc!

My Uncle Chauncey's phonetic rendition went something like this:

Ker-tee-or fahk-tus, Kwah-mo brem Explor-itor-i-bus Hose-tase spem, Down in a coal mine shoveling smoke

Hyde Park High School. .. Hick, Hike, Hoke!

Now that is one tidbit of Hyde Park Trivia that has always seemed to me to be important enough to preserve! Ciiil

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THE POINT IS...

The Point is Promontory Point , an important feature of Daniel Burnharn's 1909 Plan for Chicago, created by landfill in the 1920s, and in 1937, landscaped by Alfred Caldwell. For all the years since, the Point has been an oasis for the community-a place to stroll and swim and play and meditate.

In January, 2001, the Chicago Park District held a public meeting at which they unveiled a plan to replace the Point's lirnesrone seawall with a massive concrete and steel revetment-part of a large, federally funded project already in progress for several years. At the meeting, attended by over 200 people, community members expressed overwhelming opposition to the plan which was seen as both a violation of the Park's aesthetic beauty and a compromise of its recreational uses. An ad hoc group called the Community Task Force for Promontory Point was formed with the aim of seeking alternatives to the Park District's design.

In the seventy-five years since its construction, wave action bas indeed damaged sections of the seawall and the Task Force recognizes that repairs are necessary.

And, although the city has offered some modifications, the plan still appears to community members to be a greater threat to the Point than the ravages of time and nature. The proposed redesign is not only ugly and inimical to traditional uses-it also appears to be significantly over-engineered. It should not be necessary to destroy the Point in order to save it.

The Task Force has made it clear to Park District officials that their plan is unacceptable to the community and the city has postponed construction until April, 2003. Now the challenge is co present the city with positive and unambiguous guidelines for any new design-guidelines which include an engineering survey as well as consideration of the historic character of the Point and the public's access to it.

The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation has recognized the importance of this effort with a $20,000 grant to the Historical Society on behalf of the Community Task Force for Promontory Point. In addition to the direct grant, the Foundation will match every dollar the community raises up co $5000. That could mean another $10,000 roward the considerable expenses involved in an engineering study of the Point.

MATCHING GRANT UPDATE: Thanks to HPHS members and to the whole community, we have reached our

$5000 matching grant goal. Bravo Hyde Parkers! Special thanks to the Driehaus Foundation!

TRY THIS ON YOUR INTERNET:

hydeparkh istory.org

Have you looked at the Society's webpage yet? It's easy to do: just type "hydeparkhistory.org" (don't use the quotation marks) and you'll find a source of information about our activities. There are interesting items, many taken from the newsletter, and a few others as well. People all over the country have been discovering us on the internet and getting in touch with us.

Our purpose is to provide educational material for students-check "Kids' Corner" to see some stories rewritten in language appropriate for elementary school children. We welcome your suggestions and your contributions of material to make our site even more usefuI.

If you would like more information about this project using an older form of communication, call Alice Schlessinger at 773-493-1994.

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U Ill 111 I'

BACKYARD BASEBALL

Like most of the pre-teen boys growing up in Chicago, baseball was something we all played, beginning in the spring before going away to Michigan for the summer. We played in Jackman Field behind our elementary school during a compulsory gym period every afternoon.

Bue the real adjustment of baseball's rules to accommodate special conditions came when we played in the backyard of the Stevens' boys home on 58th street near the school. There are many forms of baseball from the big league version to the pick-up sandlot modifications. The ability of baseball t0 adapt itself was tested by four boys and a dog in 1927. The rules were set out by three brothers and me, so chat our game would be clarified and disciplined.

Baseball adjusted to our self-made regulations because baseball is different from other games in chat it is not limited by time; it is outside of time. Theoretically, a game can go on

forever. We found chat we had to make our own rules, and in the case of a disagreement about the outcome of

a play, in the absence of an umpire we would toss a coin to come co the final decision.

Here are the rules, which provided for competition between two teams of players:

1. Underhand easy pitching.

2. Indian ball.

3. Pitcher's hands are out.

4. Over the fence is out.

5. If a player is on base and a hit is made, the player must go home. If home plate is rouched by an opposing player holding the ball, the player on base is out.

6. If there is any dispute, a coin

must be tossed to determine the decision.

7. If the ball hits Monday on

S I> r n g /Summer 2 0 0 2

a doubtful play, the play goes over.

8. A player on base can go as far as possible on any out, except a strike-out.

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::::: TO: HPHS MEMBERS :::::

9. On June 10, provided that more than 15 five

inning games have been played, and provided chat one

:•:··:·:·:: RE: INCOME TAX DEDUCTIONS

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......

team is more than one game ahead of the other team,

:•:·:•:•:·

The Landmarks Preservation Council of

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the losing team must buy for the winning team all the sodas, ice cream, malted O

milks, and sundaes that the winning team can eat in one hour at Kuenster's Drugstore on 57th Street.

Signed:

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:::::: Illinois wants you to know that some ::::::

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::::: Hyde Park/Kenwood residents (especially ::::::

:·:·:•:·:·: those in older homes) are eligible for -::··:•:·:•

:::::. sizable income tax deductions for 2002. ::::::

......

::::: Your property contributes to the Hyde :::::

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::::: Park/Kenwood National Register Historic ·:::::

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:::::: District and therefore whether you own a :::::

:•:·:·:··:: s i n gI e fa m i I y h om e or condom i n i u m, if ::::::

Bill Stevens

:::::: you rent, or if you own commercial

···•··

::::::

John Stevens Sam Hair

Jim Stevens

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::::: property, you should look into this :::::

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::::: opportunity. :::::

·.·.•.•.·.·. ·..·.•.·.··.

It is well to explain that rule number seven refers to

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::::: Federa I tax I aws a11 ow you to deduct :::::

"Monday," a large black and tan collie dog, who

:•:·:•:•:··

roughly 15% of the appraised value of

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would play if he could, but we told him he was not in the lineup. He was free to run and bark, and

...... ··•··

:.:.:..:.: your property from your personal I RS :::::

:.:.:..:.: income taxes. For a brochure and more :·:•:•·:·:•:

participate in that way in the excitement of the game.

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information, ca11 or write

......

The deadline of June 10th was established because that was about che rime when we all went away to

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:.:.:..:.:· Andrew Fisher ::::::

Michigan for the summer: the Stevens boys to

.:.:.:.:.:.

Landmarks Preservation Council ·..:.:.::.:.

Lakeside and I to Castle Park, not to return until after Labor Day.

It didn't matter that there were only two on each

team. And rule number four-"over the fence is out"

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53 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago, II 60604-3699

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provided our adjustment to baseball's spatial frame, which projects the lines from home plate to first and third bases into infinity. Any ball within that ultimate projection is fair; outside those lines it is foul, but sometimes playable. But we had outfield limits imposed by a fence, two brick walls, and one large house surrounding the backyard playing field.

Baseball being a game of records, it is unfortunate that there are no records of the scores of these games, and the names of those on the winning team are lost forever in the mists of over three score and ten years. The players survive: Two of the brothers are retired lawyers. The third and youngest brother is also a lawyer, and at this writing is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. I am the fourth player, not a lawyer, but carrying with me the confirmation of the metaphysical nature of our national pastime, and now more than ever aware that baseball ignores time. We proved it long ago.

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New exhibit at HPHS headquarters:

THE HERALD: 120 YEARS IN HYDE PARK

Mounted by Caitlin Devitt of the,Herald Staff, this exhibit covers the paper1s growth over 120 years. An extensive series of reprints is displayed beginning with the earliest days. A sample or two:

June 27, 1930

An editorial

June 13, 1928 Lead story-Front Page

This exhibition THE HERALD; 120 YEARS IN HYDE PARK will run through March, 200 .3, and is open from 2 to 4pm Saturdays and Sundays.

In 1980, HPHS published Volume Io/Hyde Park History (and Volume 2 as well) containing the article below which originally had been printed in the Railway Review, A11gmt 14, 1926, pp249-50

THE UNION OF

MISS TRANSPORTATION AND

GEN. ELECTRIFICATION

Four veteran locomotive engineers, none of whom had served less than thirty years, and four veteran conductors, whose total years of service were but slightly less, piloted as many trains from Matteson, Blue Island, and South Chicago to Roosevelt road, with 2,000 distinguished guests of the Illinois Central, at Chicago, Saturday August 7. The ceremony marked the official beginning of electric operation of the suburban service of the railroad at Chicago, which is expected to be complete by September 3.

All Chicago joined in the celebration sponsored by

116 civic and business organizations of the south side territory served by the railroad. Five steam trains of wooden cars pulled by locomotives that for more than forty years have hauled millions of Chicago commuters between home and work, took the invited guests from Randolph Street to Matteson, where they were transferred to two electric trains for the return journey. These trains were met at Kensington and Sixty-seventh street by similar trains from Blue Island and South Chicago. From Sixty-seventh, the four trains ran abreast to Roosevelt road.

At Roosevelt road a great assemblage of south side residents, and citizens from every section of the city, met the trains. Lacer everybody went to the south front of the Field Museum to review the parade which

expressed the commuters' belief that the south side communities from Randolph street to Matteson, South Chicago, and Blue Island are on the verge of a new and permanent era of prosperity.

The procession, formed at Thirty-fifth street and South Parkway, was more than two miles long, and contained flower decked floats bearing the pick of the beauties among rhe south side women. Individual communities had held preliminary celebrations ...

Candidates for the honor of being "Miss Transportation" had been selected and from them Miss Helen Lynn, 5845 Dorchester avenue, was chosen as queen of the fete. As the float bearing her and her handmaidens reached the museum, she was escorted to the steps of the building, where the coronet was

placed upon her brow by A. E. Clift, senior vice president of the Illinois Central R.R.

No event of greater importance has taken place in the history of the South side in the more than seventy years since chat first train ran to Hyde Park ... It was fitting, therefore, chat the program should include a pageant of the progress of transportation. This was written and directed by Bertha M. Iles, and presented on Soldier Field at 3:00pm, immediately following the parade.

After che prologue, "The Torchbearers of Progress," came in order scenes representing the early emigration from the Atlantic seaboard to the great prairies in the hinterland beyond the Alleghenies. As the scene depicting the Trail of the Wilderness came on, Mrs. P.

D. Bowler sang Cadman's "In the Land of the Sky Blue Water," and a group of red men passed in review with the travois, the method they used in transporting their effects from one camping ground ro another.

Then followed the covered wagon... the pony express and stagecoach. Ocher scenes were "Down to the Sea in Ships." "Manifold Means of Transportation," in which 1,200 children from the public school playgrounds participated, "In the Land of the Magic

Carpet," showing oriental methods of transportation and, incidentally, a hayrack of two or more decades ago. "In the Days When Dobbin Was King" and "The Coming of the Motor Car" brought history down to the present, which was given under the title, "The Spirit of Electricity" and that was shown as the union of Miss Transportation and General Electrification.

In the evening there was a dinner in the grand banquet hall of the Palmer House, at which the Jackson Park Hotel Association acted as hose. Fifteen hundred invitations were issued out, and if one may judge by appearances, no one sent regrets. Colonel George T. Buckingham, the toastmaster, gave a review of the history of the early efforts of Illinois to improve its transportation facilities.

Senior Vice President A. E. Clift told how the history of the South Side of Chicago has been joined with that of the Illinois Central R.R. He said that, large as has been the expenditure required for electrification, and impossible as it is to realize full monetary return upon so great a sum, the railroad will feel repaid amply if it results in establishing a permanent feeling of good will toward the railroad among the people of the city ... ''The expressions of friendship we have received today," said he, "have touched us greatly, and have gone deep into our

hearts. We have striven hard to secure the good will of our patrons, but never before have we had such a demonstration that we have succeeded. We appreciate deeply the friendship which has been displayed, and will make the utmost effort in the future to merit its continuance."

In a footnote we are told that Miss Lynn had worked as a stenographer in the wholesale department at Marshall Field & Co.... "Being queen of the fete may have enhanced her prospects-beauty queens should not be wasted on wholesale offices. The 1928 city directory listed her as a SALESWOMAN in the main department store of Marshall Field & Co. downtown."

"Hyde Park talent was also represented by the author of the "Pageant of Progress," Bertha Iles, directed the Academy of Dramatic Education during

the 1920s, and lived at 5416 Cornell Avenue." C1iil

Excerpts from The Hyde Park of Yesterday from Hyde Park Now and Then, published to commemorate the Opening of the Hyde Park-Kenwood National Bank Building,

April 20, 1929

Seventy-one years ago (1858) an Illinois Central train rolled southward from Chicago on one of its three daily runs to Hyde Park. It came to a stop at 56th Street and Cornell, the end of the line, and out stepped a lone passenger. She was Mrs. Eliza Dennison Jameson, and she stood with her boxes around her on the grass (there was no station) and surveyed what was to be her future home.

In three directions she saw prairie, sand hills, trees and flowers, with perhaps the glimpse of a single house; and in the fourth direction, the lake. The lake bas not changed so much, but a good deal has taken place in the other three directions!

Mrs. Jameson walked three blocks north to the house at 53rd and Cornell built by her husband, Judge Jameson. From its porch one could look straight north to the LC. station at Lake Street in Chicago. There were just seven other houses in the section, and they were widely scattered. They were occupied by the families of Warren S. Bogue, Chauncey Stickney, Paul Cornell, Dr. A.B. Newkirk, Charles Spring, Sr.,

Charles Spring, Jr., and Dr. J. A. Kennicott, who

named his estate "Kenwood" after the home of his ancestors in Scotland.

From the very first, the comer of 53rd street and Hyde Park Avenue was the center of activity for the community. Besides the depot there was the first general store, on Hyde Park Avenue just south of 53rd. It was about 10 feet square and was kept by Hassan A. Hopkins, who had come to Hyde Park in 1856 as a bookkeeper to Paul Cornell. Here, too, was the first post office, established in 1860 with George

W. Waite commissioned postmaster. And on the northeast corner of this intersection was the first bank, founded by Daniel A. Pierce and operated by him alone for some years. At chis same corner, in 1858, Paul Cornell built the first church, used by all the residents. It was sold in 1876 to the village and used as a town hall and police station, with the addition of

r\ u I 11 111 11 \\' I II I e r 2 0 0 2

a basement which served as a jail after the old wooden lockup on the lake shore between 51st and 52nd streets had been washed away.

Crime in the present day sense was unknown in that Arcadia, according to Nicholas Hunt, who at 81 remembers well his forty years of service with che police department. He tells of the days when his duties consisted mainly of keeping an eye on hunters and picnickers, with occasional excitement as when a band of "rustlers" rounded up the high-bred cows kept by early residents and drove them into the Dunes in Indiana. Mr. Hunt tracked the thieves down and restored the village's milk supply.

Hyde Park had a school almost as soon as it had an existence. In 1856 Charles B. Waite bought the land at the northwest corner of 53rd Street and Lake Park Avenue for a seminary which opened in 1859 with Mrs. Waite as principal and her sisters as assistants. It was a four-story building where most of the first settlers' children studied until it was discontinued in 1870. The first public school was built in 1863 at Lake Avenue and 50th and later became the first Hyde Park High School. This school was noted for its Agassiz Association, whose members had ample opportunity to pursue their researches into natural history in Hyde Park as it was then.

Of the newspapers, the Hyde Park Herald is the only one which has continued since its founding in 1882. W

and...

Hyde Park National Bank

Mark your calendar/

t\ u f u m n / \V i II f c r 2 0 0 2

Looking Back A Bit...

From the Newsletter of the Hyde Park Historical Society November, 1981

HYDE PARK HERALD CELEBRATES 100 YEARS

The Herald covered an area that was in the 1880s the largest village in the world, stretching from 39th to 115th St. It listed its population, its real estate, its financial worth and even its street car timetables. But most of its social news originated in the present Hyde Park, Kenwood and Woodlawn areas.

The paper had a history as varied and as•dramatic in many ways as the community. It began life as the South Side Herald, published by Clarence P. Dresser. Little is known about him except that he was the Washington correspondent as well as the publisher of the Herald which he began in January, 1882 with Fred F. Bennett. Both Dresser and Bennett were classmates in Hyde Park, along with John D.

Sherman, who joined them and also wrote articles and editorials.

Personal journalism was rampant in the early days and no holds were barred in reporting or in expressing editorial opinions. The Herald was no exception. One of the most vivid examples is in the January 24, 1884 issue where it is reported: "A brute named Cavill,

who has richly deserved to be drummed out of town, was fined $15 and costs for beating his wife, a nice, quiet, little woman whom the Union Charitable Society have (sic) established in a small store near the school-house. He is a good workman, but lazy, and has not even the excuse of drunkenness for his brutality to his wife."

The Herald inveighed against the annexation of Hyde Park into Chicago in 1889, warning readers chat only the saloon keepers would benefit from such a vote because Hyde Park was "dry" and Chicago was "wet."

1955

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HYDE PARK IN POETRY...

A Song of the Midway Tars

'Twas in ninety-two, in an autumn light, When Doctor Harper hove in sight

And shoved out his anchor with keen delight, Go it, Chicago, yo ho!

He had a small but gallant crew;

They'd manned the ropes when the winds blew, blew, And they were a brave and favored few,

Go it, Chicago, yo ho!

The ship's grown bigger and so has her crew, For she has a world of work to do,

To cruise round the earth for me and you, Go it, Chicago, yo ho!

The Captain has a right good eye;

He steers by the stars in the changeless sky, And he flies the maroon away up high,

Go it, Chicago, yo ho!

From young Chicago she sets sail;

She feels old Michigan's favoring gale, And she greets the future, "Hail, all hail!" Go it, Chicago, yo ho!

The Varsity ship sails every sea;

She touches at the port of each countree, And she's bound for truth and eternity, Go it, Chicago, yo ho!

From a City Roof (Hyde Park)

On the deck of my big night steamer, aloft in my low sea-chair,

Wrapped round with a southern softness and breathing a sweet sea air,

I sail of a summer evening beneath a starry sky,

And wonder long at the beauty that never passes by.

For I see on the far-off Temple a crown of softened light That rests like a golden glory on the city in its might; And off at the harbor's entrance, where the piers push long and dark,

The red and yellow beacon flashes out its shining mark.

And down past the lone Rabida, below the reddened cloud,

Flame up the leaping torches where the ranks of labor crowd;

Till my eye goes wondering lakeward where the

constellations move

Of the hidden ships that pass and their pilot's eye approve.

The Midway's glittering pageant, reaching down from park to park,

Shoots a thousand auto signals through the scintillating dark;

And the studious windows shining in the Varsity's looming walls

Mark off in mellow outline the gray old Gothic halls.

And all below me gleam the lights of a myriad city homes

That are dearer to the city man than a myriad glittering domes;

For the faces there are glowing with a love that keeps him strong

And comes to his wearied heart and brain like the sweetness of a song.

So, when the night comes down above the city streets, And silent-shining star his silent brother greets,

On the deck of my lofty roofl love to take my sail, And watch the passing lights and the stars that never fail.

The Old Fine Arts Building at Night (Jackson Park)

Enmarbled by the moon's pale magic light That pours her whitning rays on roof and wall And by her touch celestial changes all,

It stands a classic temple in the night.

Here rest those lustrous wings in beauty bright The sleepless lions chat no fears appall;

The caryatids in their beauty call,

And strong-limbed centaurs eager for the fight.

Athena's lifted temple, to the eyes Of gazing citizens, no fairer gleamed

Beneath the sun of chose transparent skies

Than here amid the land by Greeks undreamed, Where hurrying millions rush in mad empries, Those shadowy columns in the moonlight rise.

From Poems on Chicago and Illinois by Horace Spencer Fiske

p11blished by The Stratford Company, Boston, Mass. 1927

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What's Been Happening at HPHS?

A Report by Program Chairman jay Mulberry

2002 has been the most active year for the Society that anyone can remember, and 2003 seems likely to continue the trend. In the last 9 months we have sponsored ten presentations and three exhibits. If you don't believe it, count them:

EXHIBITS:

November, 2001 to April, 2002 - The History of International House, mounted by Bert Benade, Vy Uretz, Steve Treffman and others

April, 2002 to November, 2002-The Filipino American Community in Hyde Park, mounted by Estrella Alamar and Willi Buhay

November, 2002 to the present-120 Years of the Herald, mounted by Caitlin Devitt and some of her friends

PRESENTATIONS:

March-The History of International House by Cla1tde Weil

April-The Filipino American Comrrmnity in Hyde Park

by Estrella Alamar and Willi Buhay

June-Mary Herrick: Hyde Park's Educator/ Activist by Tim Black and James Wagner

July-History of Promontory Point by Jack Spicer

August-History of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club by Linda Swift

September-Ear/ B. Dickerson: Forgotten Giant of African American History by Tim Black

September-Remembering 9111 moderated by Quentin Young

September-The Michigan Avenue Garden Apartments

by Peter Ascoli

October-The Future of Promontory Point by Jack Spicer November-120 Years of the Herald by Bruce Sagan December 15-Holiday Celebration with Abner Mikva

And on top of all that, in April we began a monthly series of articles on Hyde Park history for the Herald. These have already mounted up to quire a number:

Filipino Americans in Hyde Park by Jay Mulberry

57th Street Art Fair by Alice Schlessinger

Mary Herrick by May Lord

William H. Ray by Carol Bradford

The Hyde Park Neighborhood Clztb by Linda Swift

Earl B. Dickerson by Alta Blakley

The Michigan Aven11e Garden Apartments by Devereux Bowly

Hyde Park's African American History by Sidney Williams, Jr.

120 Years of the He1'aldby Caitlin Devitt

Herman Cohn, Hyde Park Pioneer by Jay Mulberry

Beside the quantity and quality of the activities we have sponsored, you will notice the diversity of their organizers. Lots of people work with us; we depend on that. And you can be one of those people. If you

would like to work on an article or a presentation or an exhibit or a tour, call our program director, Jay Mulberry at 773/288-1242 or email him at jamulberry@aol.com. He doesn't just wane you to work, he wants to work with you!

And, if you are nor a member, do sign up today!

Tim Black speaks to the Society about Earl B. Dickerson

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New exhibit at HPHS headquarters opens on Sunday, May 4, 2003:

BOB PICKEN:

HYDE PARK'S CANDY MAN

THE POLITICS OF ROBERT PICKEN

by jay F. Mulberry

On Sunday, May 4, the Hyde Park Historical Society will open a new exhibit, "Bob Picken: Hyde Park's Candy Man." Bob was that, all right: president of Peerless Confection Company, he was one of our community's most successful businessmen. Everybody seems to have seen him in his shirtsleeves filling candy shelves at the Coop and if you worked a precinct with him, or flipped pancakes beside him at the Neighborhood Club, or just met on the street, you probably got something from his pocketful of sweets. His candy contributions helped keep the Kenwood Academy Swim Team afloat during the '90's as they

also supported many schools and churches.

When he died two years ago at age 89, everyone knew Bob Picken was the candy man, but fewer remembered that from the 1940's through the 1980's he had been a force in the liberal politics of Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois and even, to some extent, the nation.

Bob Picken arrived in Hyde Park in 1947 with the intention of getting a Ph.D. in economics under an old mentor, Paul Douglas. There seemed to be hope for a liberal Democrat then: The Independent Voters of Illinois was three years old, Martin Kennelly was a new reform Mayor and Robert Merriam was 5th Ward

alderman. In the background, Richard J. Daley was

Cook County Sheriff, and rising.

Bob was 37. He had been in Europe during World War II and, as local activitist Alan Dobry sees it, "he was part of a group who, after the Second World War, wanted to make a difference." But Bob arrived with considerable experience and an informed liberal perspective. During the 1930's he had been a teacher

Bob Picken leads a Good Neighbor Walk-a-thon to benefit the Neighborhood Club, 1984.

in Milwaukee and a Teachers' Union organizer. Deeply a liberal Democrat, his Union was affiliated with the Socialist Farmer Labor Progressive Federation (FLPF) and he became one of its leaders. Frank Zeidler, FLPF leader and later the most famous in a series of Socialist mayors of Milwaukee, was counted as a close friend.

You can recognize the bustling, practical and effective Bob Picken of Chicago in the 20-something activist remembered by Zeidler:

"This organization was intended to be a kind of amalgam of labor, farmers, Socialists, and some Progressive Republicans. Bob attended ward meetings. He worked on distributing campaign literature and often advanced policies for calling voters' attention to the FLPF. He took part in meetings and I think on occasion acted as chair of the ward organization. He became well known to the group surrounding the Socialist Mayor Daniel W.

Hoan, whose movement joined the FLPF." ►@

-<O Another trait chat Zeidler recognized and admired was also appreciated by many of his co-workers in the fledgling IVI. That is, Bob's incurable optimism:

"One characteristic of Bob," Zeidler wrote, "was that when other persons saw dark prospects to things, he could see the bright side of events and could see how conditions considered unfortunate could be turned co give people new advantages and hope.

Obstacles were no problem co him whether in debate or distributing literature. Bob found a good and pleasant way to achieve his goals and did it with a smiling look of discovery. This was a splendid trait for me and his associates in a minor political party with not much hope of success. When I was in public office, I reflected from time co time on the great lessons of philosophy I learned from Bob.and Doris who persisted in their work for the general good."

This great optimism-his "smiling look of discovery"-was so characteristic and so important to chose with whom Picken worked that it is mentioned constantly. "He never said a bad word about anybody," remarked Lois Dobry, while her husband affirmed, "he was unable to hold a grudge." Louis Silverman, who was the IVI's political action chair when Bob first joined the organization, remembers that much of his effectiveness was due co the fact that "He was wonderful with people, completely free from personal ambition and managed never co be caught in the games played by those around him." Barbara Flynn Currie who worked with him when he was virtually an elder statesman comments that part of his strength was chat "he never threw his weight around, he earned his leadership."

Bob deflected compliments of chis kind by giving his optimism a practical spin: "Do unto others better than they would do unto you and it will drive chem crazy!," he often said with a laugh.

In 1947, Bob and his first wife, Doris, moved from Wisconsin co an apartment on University Avenue..

According co Frank Zeidler, in Milwaukee "there was a great sense chat the city was losing two strong people who made the community much better." The house into which they moved on the corner of Ellis and 56th Street is gone. On its lot, U. of C. President and Nobel Prize winner George Beadle lacer puttered with mutant corn. Now it is being covered by a new physical activities center.

Bob and Doris threw themselves into Hyde Park activities. Doris, was active in League of Women Voters. Bob fell in at once with the IVI and the first campaign he worked in was chat of his teacher and friend, Paul Douglas. Douglas had returned from the

War with authentic credentials as a hero and was slated by the Democratic Party to lose. He and a political neophyte named Adlai Stevenson were given the nod by Jacob Arvey, the new Democratic king maker, because it was co be a "Republican year" and the loss by two liberals would hardly matter. Anyway, the Party wasn't wasting any money or workers on chem. (Among ocher things, chis was the campaign in which Abner Mikva cried co volunteer at the local Democratic headquarters and was turned down with the timeless machine sentiment: "We don't want nobody nobody sends.")

Bue Douglas wanted workers, especially if nobody sent chem, and Bob Picken jumped in. What chores he performed for the campaign couldn't be discovered, but he made a financial contribution at a moment when it was very much needed and in a way chat was very much appreciated. Douglas writes in his memoirs, "We were strapped for funds and had barely kept going. We had done so only by the sacrifices of friends and former students such as Robert Picken who, when I did not want to cake his initial gift of

$500 promptly proceeded co double it." (page 135, In the Fullness of Time). At the time Picken was not president of a major corporation but a lowly graduate student. The contribution was, indeed, generous. As everyone knows, when the votes were counted, the war hero and the egghead had w'on.

In 1949, with Douglas in Washington, Picken went co work for Peerless Candy doing what he called "gofer" work for his father-in-law, its founder and president. He was a natural for the job and responsibilities increased rapidly, so that he abandoned his graduate studies forever in the early 1950's.

However, his activities in policies did not cease and his importance co the IVI grew. From the point of view of IVI young bloods such as Louis Silverman, Picken's earlier work in Milwaukee and his position as a successful businessman gave him status with the Old Guard. Bue co Silverman he showed a flexibility and openness chat made him an important mediator between the old and the young. "He was quite different from the ocher leaders," says Silverman, "He wasn't an ideologue. He was willing co try new things and he cook great joy in the proposition that youth must be served".

The IVI grew famous fighting for lost causes and many, unlike the Douglas campaign, proved to be truly lost. Len Despres and Louis Silverman both cell of an effort that cook the organization into the belly of the beast.

In 1953, Silverman and Despres wanted the IVI co expand its activities beyond the lake front. Important leaders such as Paul Douglas were against the move

Si,,·lng 2003

Bob with a gathering of Hyde Parkers including Barrett O'Hara and Maynard Krueger. Do readers recognize any others?

but Bob Picken favored it. When the die was cast he jumped in with "his money, a parry and his support" as Silverman remembers it. In an early application of its new policy, the IVI supported the candidacy of a Republican opponent to Vito Marzullo in the 25th Ward. Marzullo was a lot to tackle bur they did it because, in Despres' words, "he was a malign influence." Marzullo was hardly terrified: "You can take all your news media and all the do-gooders in town and move them into my 25th Ward, and do you know what would happen? On election day we'd beat you fifteen to one." And, in fact, it was worse than fifteen to one. "We carried one precinct," according to Despres, "and, buoyed by our success, we went on to support Marmaduke Carter for the state legislature, and won!" It was in the these two contests that Leon Despres and Robert Picken experienced the beginning of a long and productive relationship.

By 1954 Picken was still "gofering" at Peerless but he was well established in the inner circles of liberal politics. And liberal politics wasn't doing too badly. There were liberals (and more important, honest men) in the Senate and the governor's office, and even the outgoing mayor, Martin Kennelly, had been a relief

from the unbroken train of hacks dating back to the 20's. In this atmosphere, Chicago's 5th Ward alderman, Robert Merriam, thought he had a chance to be mayor. And, according to Mike Royko he deserved it: "A splendid orator, good-looking, knowledgeable, energetic and youthfully mature, Merriam would have been expected to crush Daley in

any city bur Chicago." (page 87, Boss: Richard J.

Daley of Chicago).

Leon Despres recalls the events that led from Merriam's decision to his own start in elective office:

"In the Fall of 1954, Bob Picken, Richard Meyer,

Louis Silverman and I mer with Bob Merriam on a Saturday morning and Merriam told us that he was about to run for mayor on the Republican ticket and he needed a strong candidate for alderman in the 5th Ward. He turned to us, to Bob because he had some high position in the IVI, to Louis Silverman because he had managed the campaign for Marmaduke Carter and the campaign [against Marzullo] in the 25th Ward, to Dick Meyer who had been a previous chairman of IVI and to me as current chairman. We four were taken by his confidence in us. He was launching us on a

campaign that would at least be significant. We set ►E,

Spring 2003

<@ to work to find a good candidate. But by Thanksgiving weekend we still hadn't found one. That was when Bob Picken, Lou Silverman and Dick Meyer and probably others met separately from me and decided, in desperation, that they would run me for alderman. That started the aldermanic campaign and that started a long association with Bob Picken."

Bob Picken was enormously important to Leon Despres. For many years after his election the two held weekly breakfast meetings in the Despres home which was two doors from the Pickens' along "Professors Row" on 56th Street. They discussed all the issues before the Council and the city and Despres took his friend's advice very seriously:

"For the twenty years that I was alderman, Bob was a source of enormous strength. What was extraordinary about Bob was his remarkable judgment; he just had very, very good political judgment. He seemed to understand what was involved in a campaign and as the campaign wore on, if things didn't go well he understood what the problems were. His practical advice-practical and theoretical, he mingled them was so good that I really looked forward to those meetings and depended heavily on him. I saved up problems to discuss them with him and was enormously helped by those discussions. He was just a superb person Hewas simply first rate. Those

sessions stand out in my mind for his remarkable judgment, and his generosity of spirit."

Picken's advice was always welcome but never more so than during the months of 1960 and 1961 when the news was dominated by the story of the Summerdale police scandal. The story began with the discovery of a burglary ring whose members were all policemen out of the burglary detail. It erupted because it not only involved police corruption but suggested enormous inefficiency and lack of control.

Despres took a major role in advocating a plan modeled after the independent police commission used in Milwaukee, Bob Picken's old territory.

Eventually his idea was adopted, though he thinks now "it turned out to be not as important as I hoped, because the Mayor continued to control the commission." It did, however, strike a blow for independence and it certainly brought Despres to prominence. (And it brought television to the City Council when Len O'Connor walked in unannounced with his TV crew to cover the hearings. That caused consternation and outrage among the pols, but the cameras are still there.)

All during the months of the scandal Picken was Despres' mentor:

"Bob was very good on that issue, I remember. I was really astonished. Bob understood immediately that I

had become, without my realizing it, a great source of news. He understood and urged me to continue with my advocacy. As a relatively new alderman I hadn't understood how advocating a position against almost unanimous opposition created a center of interest. It sounds a little simple now but at the time it was an important discovery, thanks to Bob."

Thinking back on it, Despres does not see this as the work that would today come from a media expert, but of a deep political thinker:

"He understood public relations as they grew out of the positions in the campaigns you were working on. He was not a public relations expert. That wasn't Bob's forte. His forte was seeing what was deeply involved [in an issue} and developing the public appeal from that.''

The weekly meetings with Leon Despres during the 1950's and 1960's were important but they were only a small part of Bob Picken's activities. In 1955 he became president of Peerless Confectioners assuming the job upon the death of his father-in-law. But he was also Chair of the Hyde Park IVI and, in that capacity, was among those who decided that 28-year-old Abner Mikva would get IVI support in his bid for the State legislature. In Hyde Park, that support was crucial, but to Mikva the personal support of Bob Picken was a great asset. "I was very young and he brought a kind of gravitas to my campaign," he recalls. "He never trumpeted his own cause. He was just incredibly effective. His background in business made him better at dealing with people like Julian Levy and Daley than Len [Despres} and I were. He could see their points of view, and be sympathetic to them without giving in to them." But while he was running the campaign, and sometimes running interference with the likes of

Julian Levy and Richard J. Daley, Picken was not

above licking envelopes and cleaning up the office. "There was no task he wouldn't do," says Mikva, and as the IVI Chair, was not above janitorial work-the President of Peerless Confections could be found answering his own phone and typing his own letters. On election day, he worked his precinct and found time to visit every other precinct in the 5th Ward with pockets full of candy for the judges.

After he was elected and until he moved from Hyde Park to Evanston, Mikva used Picken as a sounding board. "He had incredibly good common sense, especially about financial matters. As one example, he advised me intelligently on the matter of the state income tax, which other people opposed as being anti business. He, a very successful businessman, explained that businesses don't care so much about the tax itself as about the stability of the tax policy. Good businessmen always know how to price their products

S p r I n !J 2 0 0 3

to accommodate the local taxes."

The great local political subject of the 'SO's was urban renewal and in 1958 the issue came to a crisis for Despres. "The University, particularly represented by Julian Levy, decided I must be replaced. And, a lot of my original supporters just went away from me.

You could feel the support being eroded." Picken may have personally held a different view from Despres. "He was moderate on urban renewal," according to Abner Mikva. But his support in the campaign was crucial and he gave it unstintingly. Despres remembers:

"Bob was a stalwart, Bob grasped the issues and felt that, yes, I had raised a significant point, I had risked political support but he never wavered in his feeling that it was an important issue and, yes, he would continue to support me. You might have thought that someone one in Bob's community positioq might have said, 'Well, you have jeopardized your own situation.· But Bob was a stalwart."

Inevitably Picken became the State Chairman of the IVI and though he still worked his precinct, he was a force to be reckoned with in good government circles. "People always asked, 'Do we have Bob's support?' He was one of those people whose stand was always important," remembers Alan Dobry. He was a kind of "eminence grise," says Barbara Flynn Currie.

So it is particularly poignant that in 1978 Bob Picken showed just how independent an Independent can be. Barbara Flynn Currie was running for the State House of Representatives for the first time. She stood against a field of eight candidates, among whom

was the elderly Louis Caldwell with much better name recognition. IVI endorsement would have helped the young candidate but despite the support of Bob Picken the endorsement was not given.

Bob Picken knew Barbara Currie well and considered her the best candidate. She had worked with his first wife, Doris, in the League of Women Voters and he thought he could predict the kind of legislator she would make. So the sixty-seven year old elder statesman of the Independents quit the IVI to work in the Currie campaign. He put himself into it heart and soul; he worked his precinct; he gave candy to the judges. When she won, he went back to rejoin his "party." And Bob's second wife, Rita, who had been President of the Wisconsin State League of Women Voters, arrived in Chicago just in time to pass out literature on blustry IC platforms and shopping centers on behalf of Barbara Flynn Currie in one of her

later elections. Cli:J

Books cited:

Paul H. Douglas. In the Fullness of Time: The Memoirs of Paul

H. Douglas. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: New York: 1972 Mike Royko. Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: New York: 1971

The author wishes to thank Alan and Lois Dobry, Leon Despres, Louis Silverman, Barbara Flynn Currie and Abner Mikva for speaking with him about Robert Picken, and Frank Zeidler for sending a helpful letter on the subject.

Bob Picken, The Candy Man, contributed to every community endeavor. Here he is pictured at the St. Nicholas Market at St. Thomas Apostle Parish

Sprlng 2003

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY: MURDER, MAGIC, AND MADNESS AT THE FAIR THAT CHANGED AMERICA

By Erik Larson

Reviewed by Rosel/en Brown

This review is published with the permission ofThe Chicago Tribune, where it first appeared an February 9, 2003.

Rosel/en Brown is novelist, and a member of the Hyde Park Historical Society. Among her novels, the most recent is Half a Heart; others include the New York Times bestseller Before and After. One of her short stories was chosen by John Updike for his collection The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Ms. Brown lives in Hyde Park and is currently developing a work of historical fiction centering on the Columbian Exposition of 1893.

A few years ago, new to Chicago, I found myself strolling behind the Museum of Science qnd Induscry, enchanted by the grandeur of the building and the loveliness of its lagoon. Soon enough I discovered that this magnificent contrast of stone and water is all that remains, along with a few bridges and the faint echo of a Japanese garden, of a vanished city-not a drowned Midwestern Atlantis but hundreds of acres of certifiably genuine buildings that cast monumental shadows beside the lake a century ago. To anyone who has seen photographs of what thrived on this spot, its erasure is all too metaphoric for what will eventually be our own. It is unbearably haunting.

Buildings come and go, of course; they fall to changes in style and commercial usefulness, to fire (as Chicago knows so well), to the redesign of neighborhoods. Rarely are they built to be ephemeral. But, as every Chicagoan also seems to know-some vaguely, but many by way of family memories and hoards of silver spoons, guidebooks, colorful tickets the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a dream city, built to dazzle and inspire, to educate and, not least, to bring glory to a city much of which had been incinerated little more than 20 years earlier and whose cultural pretensions, in any event, were commonly derided. Unlike the city being reborn around it, the fair was created to evaporate in a mere six months, a bubble in time. Only the Palace of Fine Arts was made permanent, and though the scale of its reincarnation as a museum may exhaust visitors and their curious children, it was hardly the grandest of the temples in its brief day.

Now Erik Larson, whose previous best-seller, "Isaac's Storm," took on nature's wonders as opposed to man's, has written "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America," a hugely engrossing chronicle of events public and private. (The nickname "the White City" came about because those pillared, domed and

lavishly ornamented colossi, celebrations of new technology, of art, of regional cultures, were actually simple sheds elaborately overlaid with a hardy but impermanent material that glowed white in the sun.)

Larson paints persuasive portraits of the ambitious and talented men-they were, of course, nearly all men-who fought for the commission to build the fair (for which New York, Washington and St. Louis had lustily competed), oversaw its difficult and incredibly speedy construction and worried over its problematic existence in grim economic times: Daniel Burnham; his partner, versatile and all-too-short-lived John

Root; perfectionist Frederick Law Olmsted, who transformed a desolate swamp into a site of lushly landscaped splendor. Larson adds an opinionated chorus of out-of-town architects and miscellaneous accomplices, such as Sol Bloom, who at 21 created the unruly spectacle of the Midway and its exotic international attractions. (Where would the world be without the invention of wonders from the Ferris wheel to Cracker Jacks to Aunt Jemima pancakes?)

Then again, even the presumably sober side of the exposition displayed everything from Columbus' journal and the world's largest dynamo to a 22,000- pound Canadian cheese and a map of the U.S. made entirely of pickles. All in all, the fair seemed to have been designed by PT. Barnum in consultation with the most serene Greco-Roman city builder, crossed yet again with a representative of an indigenous, democratic American vernacular. Considering the sordid poverty and corruption of so much of Chicago in those years, "With its gorgeous classical buildings packed with art, its clean water and electric lights, and its over-staffed police department, the exposition was Chicago's conscience, the city it wanted to become." That the closing ceremony was pre-empted by the funeral of Mayor Carter Harrison, murdered by a madman with his own balked ambitions, adds an almost implausible irony.

All this would have made a sufficiently lively book.

But Larson has intercut another story so dark and horrifying that, taken together, the two seem to represent the best and the worst of human potential. "(T]his book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow," Larson promises in his prologue. He is not exaggerating. Each story is finally deepened by reflection on the other, even if their simultaneity sometimes seems more coincidental than he contends.

Seven years before the exposition, a handsome and, as it turned out, diabolically devious young man arrived in Chicago fresh from medical school at the University of Michigan. Probably Herman Mudgett

Spring 2003

could have pursued his nefarious plans anywhere because they were fueled by urban anonymity, but the thriving village of Englewood seemed a particularly promising site for the pharmacy he intended to run. He secured a store at 63rd and Wallace and began a career as a psychopath with far more lurid, elaborate and methodical plans than Jack the Ripper, who merely slit the throats of unfortunate prostitutes who crossed his path.

A few years later, thousands of young people were streaming into Chicago, some to see the fair, most to find love and work amidst the thrills of the newly industrialized city. This flux, Larson contends, created the conditions in which a serial lady-killer like Mudgett could thrive.

He fitted out the upper floors of the building he called the Castle, named it The World's Fair Hotel and began taking in guests. Invoking a deadly charm and a boundless capacity for lying, the young doctor (who called himself, among other names, H.H. Holmes, perhaps after Sherlock) inveigled one young woman after another into loving, trusting, and even becoming engaged to or marrying him. Most appeared to present opportunities for robbery by way of inheritance, or as subjects of insurance policies of which he made himself the beneficiary. The ingenious ways he secured their fortunes always appeared legal. All he did, when they became inconvenient, was murder them.

And worse: As though the boldness of the moment inspired such daring, in his Castle above the store he constructed a crematorium: a room sealed by a safelike, soundproof door, fitted with a pipe into which he could feed gas; a chute leading to a basement boneyard, double-lined like a kilo with firebrick and a burner that could provide 3,000- degree heat.

Given the difficulties of tracing newly arrived fairgoers whose itineraries were unknown to their families, it is impossible to say how many victims Holmes might have dispatched. Some estimates guessed at 200; the police reported 50 missing persons last traced to the Castle. Larson suggests fewer, whose disappearances can be documented: sweethearts, fiances and luckless employees. No one will ever know, but the record is atrocious enough.

When he was finally brought to ground in Pennsylvania-hunted down by a zealous detective not for the police but for a suspicious insurance company-Holmes was on the run with a trunk containing the gassed remains of two little girls, daughters of a murdered employee. Holmes claimed to be proud of his derangement. "'My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape Iam

growing to resemble the devil.' " The Chicago Times Herald called him, with fine literary discretion, '"a human demon ... that no novelist would dare to invent.'" He was hanged in 1896, the source of and motivation for his pathology only to be guessed at.

Larson is a fine and sometimes eloquent storyteller with a good ear for piquant conversation, and he moves us through this chiaroscuro of light and dark with vigor. Though his footnoting scheme, meant not to distract his readers, is peculiarly confusing, he has unearthed telling quotations from sources I've seen nowhere in the many books and the thousands of Web sites devoted to the exposition, nor in a previous book about Holmes by Harold Schechter subtly titled "Depraved."

That said, there are a few dramas he does not engage at all. One, barely mentioned, is the battle royal waged between the men in power and a contingent of women under the directorship of Bertha Palmer, called the Board of Lady Managers, who wrangled about the deployment of exhibition space a separate Women's Building or full integration with the other exhibits?-aod the symbolism of each.

More surprising is the absence of any note of the anger of black Chicagoans that led to a threat to boycott the fair for having been denied any voice in its planning. The irony of the "white city's" obliviousness to the blacks in its presence is a painful moment in

the city's racial history, well-documented by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, among others, in the pamphlet (still in print) "The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition."

Occasionally Larson's writing is overwrought ("Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead."). And there are a few too many moments when his generally responsible storytelling descends into gratuitous assertions of who was thinking what, though he is at pains to insist, with italics, "This is not a work of fiction." The most ludicrous of these presumes to tell us what one hapless victim of Holmes' was thinking as she discovered herself trapped in his death-safe. It does not take a literalist to suggest that suppositions, however sympathetic, ought to be so labeled.

But this is a cavil. "The Devil in the White City" is generally exceedingly well-documented, exhaustive without being excessive and utterly fascinating in its re-creation of a complex history of diverse passions.

Chicago readers will be mesmerized by it. But its joined tales of an urban utopia with a sensational uoderstory of the torture of innocents-the

"juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil" - deserves to be hugely popular everywhere ... G

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THE IC'S COMMUTER NEWSLETTER

AND A DECADE OF TRANSITION

by John G. Allen

In October 1966 the Illinois Central Railroad inaugurated Hello.', a monthly newsletter for its Electric commuter rail customers on the South Side and in the south suburbs. Lasting through February 1975, Hello.' was an easily forgotten and often overlooked publication of the railroad's public relations department to help convey the railroad's perspective at a time when fares were rising, ridership was declining, and the original electric fleet was approaching the end of its useful service life. Yet despite these limitations, Hello/ has much redeeming value for today's historian. It brought together much information about IC Electric operations, it provided a comforting sense of community among riders, and its candid editorial style provides a welcome contrast to the sanitized euphemism of much of today's "corporate communications".

When the first issue of Hello/ appeared in 1966, the original electric cars, built for the electrification of commuter service in 1926, had been in service for 40 years and provided service on all trains. Painted dark green, the cars had taken on a color more akin to brown after four decades amid smoke from the city's heavy industry and the coal which still heated many buildings. Inside, passengers sat on rattan-covered seats (once the finest in comfort) with reversible

backs. Interiors were painted a pinkish tone, with maroon below the windows. Incandescent bulbs provided light, there were advertisements above the seats throughout the length of the cars, and the northernmost car of every train was designated as the smoking car. Underneath, the compressors which held air to release the brakes would recharge with a high-

********

BELLO!

Vol. 1. Issue No. 1. Published only for our

/1/inois Central commuters.

pitched "thunk-thunk-thunk". At each end of the cars were bench seats, above which stood grab handles for standing passengers. Twin sliding doors opened onto vestibules, painted the same dark green as the exteriors, where another set of doors opened onto

high-level wooden platforms at almost every station. The only concession to modernity was a recently installed Automatic Revenue Collection System, which had yet to shake off an unfortunate reputation for unreliability.

By the time Hello.' ceased publication, the experience of riding the IC differed from today's Metra Electric largely in the still-prevailing use of wooden platforms, and the colors of the Highliners' exterior paint and seats - minor details compared to the change that swept the railroad during the past decade. At no point since electric service started in 1926 had the IC's "suburban service", as the railroad long called it, undergone more change than during the nine years that Hello/ was published.

The newsletter was printed on letterhead or card stock, and was invariably 8 l/2 inches high. Different issues appeared with one, two, or sometimes three folds (the latter being on 8 l/2 by 14 inch paper). With the exception of a two-color issue commemorating the arrival of the Highliners, the newsletter was printed in one color-usually black, although brown, dark blue, and even dark green were also used.

The masthead was the same every month, with the volume and issue noted beside the Hello/ name (which always carried the exclamation point), and immediately underneath appeared the words "Published for our Illinois Central commuters". ►@

--<O This changed to Illinois Central Gulf in 1972 when the railroad merged with the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio, and in 197 3 the railroad adopted the formulation "Published for our Lakefront Electric Transit Commuters".

With a few exceptions during the early part of 1973, Hello! appeared between the 18th and the 24th of each month to facilitate mailing to those riders who received their monthly tickets by mail. During the week of publication, gate attendants at the Randolph and Van Buren Street stations handed out single copies to passengers as they passed through the automatic fare collection gates.

The newsletter's graphic format remained unchanged throughout its nine years. Material was printed in a conservative, easy-to-read serif type face. The articles were usually from one to three paragraphs in length, and a typical panel included three or four items. Adding to Hello!'s visual interest were a delightful assortment of small 19th century woodcuts.

The topics varied from issue to issue, but many of the items fell into one or another of the following categories:

Asking Riders' Forbearance

A recurring theme in Hello! was the aging fleet of cars from the 1920s. One item (in the 7/26/67 issue) read:

The Answer-Riders call to ask why, for heaven's sake, doesn't the railroad install air conditioning in the s11b11rban cars. This has been considered many times. A recent cost estimate was $6,720.000 for all the cars, a financial impossibility. Any new equipment that may be on the horizon would be air conditioned.

Hello!'s editors had a disarmingly self-deprecating style that is sorely lacking in many of today's "corporate communications", as this item noted (10/24/68):

Social Note-We understand that the Flossmoor ]11nior Chamber of Commerce has disbanded its "I Hate the IC" committee.

Things are looking up.

Along similar lines, the 12/20/68 Hello! noted the disbanding of the I.C. Commuters Association, a group which had been actively pressuring the railroad to improve service in 1966.

The 10/24/68 issue noted that the railroad was modifying its gates so that both the first and second sets of doors opened simultaneously when a valid ticket was inserted. This, the railroad hoped, would reduce riders' hesitation upon starting passage

through the two-part automatic gates. (In the early 1970s, the railroad would replace the awkward gates with the turnstiles still in use today.)

To help commuters understand the problems, the railroad's public relations department invited comments from commuter Charles Schlewitt, Jr., one of many who had written the railroad complaining about conditions, and printed excerpts from their conversation in Hello! (2/19/70). The level of candor suggests a company actively seeking its customers' patience and undersranding.

Writing in the 11/20/72 issue in the wake of the October 30, 1972 collision at 27th St. between two commuter trains that claimed 44 lives and injured hundreds, Hello! acknowledged the difficulty of writing about the accident, but thanked all those who came to the aid of passengers. In conclusion, Hello! said:

ICG can and will carry on. (T}he balance of the November Hello! will be devoted to its customary job of being an advocate for the co1mm1ter as well as a kind of unofficial conscience for the railroad.

Progress on the New Cars

The IC had been seeking federal money to buy a new fleet of double-deck electric cars to replace the 1920s equipment since 1967, and the US Department of Transportation approved the funding in 1968. The 1/24/69 issue announced this welcome news and printed a small photograph of a model of a car recognizably similar to today's Highliners. Subsequent issues of Hello! followed the progress of the grant money, the awarding of the contract to the Sr. Louis Car Company, and the status of construction. The 5/22/69 issue, instead of printing the regular news, was headlined "Special Issue: New Car Designs", and contained photos of mockups of the new cars, inside and our. Similarly, the 8/21/70 issue discussed a variety of technical and operating features of the new cars.

Introducing the Highliners

In preparation for the arrival of the new double deck cars, the IC announced a contest to name the fleet (2/18/71 issue). The 4/21/71 issue announced the winning entry, "Highliners", submitted by 16- year-old railfan Arthur Peterson (now a respected Chicago area transportation professional). The same issue also published a photo of one of the steam locomotives replaced when electric service srarted in 1926.

A special issue, published between the regular June

s " Ill Ill C r 2 0 0 3

and July 1971 issues and bearing only a 1971 dace, featured photographs of the Highliners and discussed their interior and exterior appointments at some length. This was followed by the 3/21/72 issue, featuring more photographs, further discussion of the cars' features, and an interior layout diagram. (In the 7/19/71 issue, incidentally, Hello/ offered to send a plan of the new cars, suitable for use in model railroad car-building, to anybody sending a stamped, self addressed envelope.)

Farewell to the Old Cars

Naturally, many commuters were happy to see the 1920s fleet go, but Hello/ did tip its hat to the old cars in a couple of issues. The 4/19/72 issue showed a picture of several of the old cars awaiting scrapping, and the 10/20/71 issue announced that two of them had been sold to the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois.

Etiquette of Commuting and Other Problems

The IC used the pages of Hello/ to commend and correct its riders. The 3/25/68 issue thanked one gentleman who sent nine 6-cent stamps for a ride he had taken without paying. On the other side of the ledger, the 4/20/70 issue was mildly scolding:

Reqmst-A gentle note to ticket-by-mail mstomers: Part of the deal on !Cs monthly mail plan is that you send 11s a check promptly each month upon receipt of your ticket. The agreement says nothing about long-term credit.

In several issues, the railroad cried to cure its riders of the habit of "train marching", or walking through the train in order to be closer to chat end of the platform where commuters wanted to exit. Shortly after the Highliners had arrived, the 9/20/71 issue warned:

Frankly, the present herd instinct is a habit from long

years of riding the old cars. It is a habit passengers will have to break on the neu· cars or else the railroad will have to lengthen schedules. No one wants that.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the years when Hello/ was in publication was the prominence of crime and violence. The 6/20/69 issue told of the presentation of the Illinois Central Medal of Honor co engineer George McKinley "for his part in the capture of a burglar attempting a break-in at the Harvey ticket office.'' And the 7/22/70 issue reprinted the text of the bright orange "Broken Window" stickers the railroad pasted on windows broken by vandals, which read, in part,

Delay in the replacement of this $15 window is temporary, due either to a delivery delay of the special glass or to the diffimlty 011r people sometimes have in keeping 11p with the n11111ber of U'indows being broken.

Noc all of the news was bad, though. The same

Hello/ noted that

A feat11re story by Ralph Stow of Chicago Today ribbed the railroad abo11t the ... Randolph Street station docks mnning /om, 35 to 40 seconds fast. Maybe they're that way became some comm11ters habit11ally run slow.

Human Interest and a Sense of Community

Hello.' editors looked for the interesting among the IC's passengers and employees. The 10/24/67 issue identified the railroad's oldest daily commuter as Lewis DeCosta of South Shore, and wished him a happy birthday (he turned 90 that month). And the2/19/70 issue asked:

Old Timers-Is it possible anyone from the "Association of'93e-rs still is riding with m? Please drop Hello/ a note.

Mr. DeCosta had presumably retired by the time the 4/20/70 issue identified Dr. Howard Wakefield as the IC's longest-riding commuter. Dr. Wakefield, 77, of Prairie Shores, took his first IC ride in 1906. ►G,

Some of the 56 old cars now out of service. Next stop for these weary MU's will be the scrap heap.

Summer 2003

--<@ Commuters of interest for other reasons sometimes were the subject of features.

The back panel of the 8/22/68 issue introduced Mrs. Bertha Gibbs, the Field Museum's reference librarian, whose desk was a short, if windswept walk from the

Roosevelt Road station-which at chat time the IC's

conductors announced as Central Station.

been glad co help you" (1/26/67).

) Gone but not entirely

forgotten was the IC's station

' at 43rd Street. The7/22/70

._-- = issue published a picture of the now-demolished building, asking readers if they could identify the

location. Likewise, the

-- 9/23/69 issue

_: --;:;.;. published a photo of

::::= ;;;::::;::::!:::;::;;::;;:::::::=c c,.,;'.:. _ ,,, the Riverdale station

at the beginning of the 20th century-a wooden depot at grade level, with no

Naturally, Hello.' acknowledged the contributions of IC employees. The 1/24/68 issue noted the retirement, after 41 years, of Harold Preston, the IC's supervisor of electric power. (Yes, Mr. Preston was working for the IC when electric service started in 1926.) The 11/20/72 issue discussed the job chat General Yardmaster James Bennett did behind the scenes, directing the movement of trains into and out of Randolph Sc. Station during the morning rush hour.

Thel0/18/71 issue commended 53rd St. ticket agent Helen Karambis, "known for the good-nattLred way she helps passengers and gets along with everybody". And the 3/19/71 issue noted the return of conductor Ed Neal, well-liked by riders on his regular train, following a heart attack:

When Ed returned to work commtJters p11t HP a big sign saying "Welcome Back Ed... Ed is especially proud that several cormmtters visited him during his stay at Ingalls Memorial Hospital.

The central figure in one human interest story wasn't even a person. The front story of the 7 /24/7 2 issue was about Hemingway, a golden retriever who boarded a rush-hour train from Homewood and was returned co his owners by helpful commuters and conductors.

Local History

From time co time, Hello.' carried brief items about the history of communities en route. Blue Island and Markham were among the suburbs so honored, the latter named for an IC president in the 1920s. The newsletter cold a story of Markham helping a lady at Central Station with her heavy suitcase. Upon learning chat the gentleman who helped her worked for the railroad, she offered to write a letter to the president

of the railroad celling how helpful he had been. Markham tipped his hat to her and cold her she didn't need to do that. "Any Illinois Central man would have

resemblance co the high-level wooden platform on a raised embankment chat would replace it when the line was electrified in the 1920s.

Hyde Park and Hyde Parkers

Occasionally, Hyde Park and its people figured in Hello.'. The 10/18/71 issue asked this about the 51st St. station location:

Comrnllter Q1tiz-As late as 1914 a station named "Madison Park" was listed in the timetable. Who knows where?

The station rebuilding at 53rd-Hyde Park and 55th-56th-57th was almost three decades in the future when Hyde Parker Howard Rosenbaum wrote to suggest replacing the "old, dilapidated platforms in the Hyde Park area with modern platforms" (his words, in the 10/20/72 issue). The railroad replied that

The CTA's modern stations were b1tilt with public money. S11ch funds are not available to !CG. The railroad has had to put station replacement at the end of a long list of commuter service priorities ...

Theback panel of the 8/18/72 issue, under the

heading "Rays of Sunshine", discussed the various murals (now, alas, some of them sorely neglected) that local artists had painted on the walls of street underpasses over which the IC traveled, and concluded:

IC Riders: We recommend a visit to Hyde Park and a stroll thro1tgh the viad1tcts to see what beauty has been created in them. The 55th Street mttrals will he dedicated Sunday afternoon, AugJJ,st 27.

The 3/25/68 issue cold about the statue on the

Midway just west of the IC tracks honoring Czechoslovakia's founding statesman Thomas Masaryk-and noted that Masaryk was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago from 1902 through 1907.

Although Masaryk may not have had much

s II Ill 111 f' r 2 0 0 3

occasion to ride the IC during his years at Chicago, other distinguished residents have been loyal IC riders. One item about famous IC commuters mentioned Clarence Darrow - who was mentioned along with John "Bet a Million" Gates, perhaps to convey the spectrum of people who have ridden the IC (1/13/67).

Regional Transit

The Illinois Central and other Chicago commuter railroads promoted the idea of an agency that would relieve them of the financial burden of their money losing commuter trains. As early as 1967, Hello/

noted the state of New Jersey's agreement to subsidize the Erie Lackawanna's commuter trains in the New York metropolitan area (5/23/67).

In the 7/24/72 and 4/19/73 issues, Hello/ talked up

the idea of what was eventually to become the Regional Transportation Authority. The newsletter urged voter passage of the March 197 3 RTA referendum in its 12/28/73 issue, shortly after the Illinois General Assembly had created the RTA, subject to its passage in a regionwide referendum.

The next issue (1/25/74) included supportive comments (published earlier in Chicago Today) by Illinois Representative Robert E. Mann, whose district included Hyde Park. The 2/14/74 issue included similar arguments from Homewood State Representative William Mahar. Finally, the 3/14/74 issue, shortly before the referendum, contained an editorial urging voter approval of the RTA (which, in recognition of the changing demographics of the IC's customer base, was also published in Spanish-the only occasion when Hello/ published an item

bilingually). Following the narrow passage of the RTA referendum question, Hello/ admitted that

ICC's preoccupation with RTA led Hello/ to get a bit long-winded in recent issues. We'll return to normal format this month.

Other Commuter Newsletters

Among Chicago's other commuter railroads, the South Shore Line and the Rock Island apparent!y issued newsletters on a sporadic basis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they were more limited in their scope. Both Shore Lines and the Rock Island Lines Commuter Bulletins were limited to communicating information about such matters as proposed service changes and the financial distress of the railroads themselves.

The author's research suggests that two other large commuter railroads, the Chicago Burlington &

Quincy (which became the Burlington Northern in 1970) and the Chicago & North Western did not publish newsletters for their riders.

The only other commuter railroad newsletter approaching Hello! in its long life and regular schedule was the Milwaukee Road's newsletter On the (Bi) Level, its name referring to the bilevel double deck configuration which by the early 1960s had become the norm for railroad commuting in Chicago. Yet even the Milwaukee Road's newsletter failed to convey a sense of community among its riders.

Although few IC riders were probably aware of it at the time, their railroad's newsletter was the leader within the genre.

Some of Hello."s outspoken style lives on in Metra's newsletter, On the Bi-Level (the name being borrowed from the Milwaukee Road's newsletter with slight modification), though the feel is somewhat different. Metra's newsletter serves all the commuter lines in northeastern Illinois and of necessity lacks the local focus of Hello/ and its counterparts.

End of an Era

Alas, Hello/, like many good things, eventually came to an end. With the 1972 merger of the IC and the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio, the railroad changed its name to Illinois Central Gulf (not reverting to the IC name again until 1987, by which time it had sold off most of the former GM&O). As changes in the economics of railroading forced ICG and its competitors to trim costs, the railroad's public relations department could no longer justify Hello! in the mid-1970s.

But at least the newsletter left the scene with dignity. The front page story of the February 1975 issue announced management's decision to cease publishing Hello/. At the end of the story was a farewell message.

In retrospect, it was clear that Hello/ had served its purpose. The passage of the 1973 Law and the 1974 referendum creating the Regional Transportation Authority guaranteed a future for northeastern Illinois' commuter railroads, including the Illinois Central, which sold its commuter operation to Metra in 1987. (The sale did not include the right to use the IC's name, which is why Metra renamed the line Metta Electric.)

Today, Hello! has been gone for a quarter of a century, and has largely been forgotten. But through its pages, we may relive some of the history of a railroad that many people across the South Side and

the south suburbs still think of as "The IC". W

BOB PICKEN AND GILBERT & SULLIVAN

The exhibit, "Bob Picken, Hyde Park's Candy Man", continues through August at the Society Headquarters. When you visit it, be sure to help yourself to a Peerless candy from the basket. All of us who knew him, expected Bob to show up with a pocket full of candy no matter where he was.

Gilbert & Sullivan (or G&S) rehearsals were no exception. Frequently, he brought bags of honeys honey queen bees, honey lemons, honey oranges, to help soothe so many scratchy throats in January and February.

One part of the HPHS exhibit features pictures of Bob in various roles through a decade and a half with the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Co of Hyde Park. Bob started singing with the company in the 1967 production of The Gondoliers (directed by Ruth Blough; music director; Roland Baily) when he accompanied his daughter, Kitty, to her first audition. A copy of the program from that production is also on view. Hooray, for ephemera! Bob was proud to tell how he first sang in G&S as Dick Deadeye in H.M.S. Pinafore nearly 40 years earlier at Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa.

He had a strong bass voice and a comfortable stage presence which he contributed to his chorus parts. The HPHS exhibit shows him in several prodLtctions of Gondoliers, also Yeoman of the Guard (with Hyde Park legend, Ray Lubway) several "Pinafores", Pirates of Penzance and three different "Mikados".

His last production was The Mikado when he was nearly 75. Because he didn't like doing all the fancy choreography, he was given a pole to hold. "Lord High Pole Holder" he was called. His costume was an historical Japanese fireman's jacket.

Be sure to stop at Headquarters during regular opening hours (2-4 Saturday and Sunday) as soon as possible. Besides pictures from G & S, there are historic views of the Hyde Park Co-op, Hyde Park politicians, HP Neighborhood Club and more.

Bob massages Ray Lubway (as Jack Point in Yeoman of the Guard). It may not have cured laryngitis, but it helped relax the singers' throats.

Bob and Kitty in H.M.S. Pinafore (the year they used hoop skirts for the women's chorus.).

Summer 2003

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- 7-;> +

Advertisement found in the publication THOUGHT, organ of the National Optimistic League, published by Magnum Bonum Company-right here in Hyde Park at 4665 Lake Avenue.

September, 1910

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Holding the Lake at Bay in Jackson Park:

The Stories of the Paved Beach and the Iowa Building

Stephen A. Treffman

The Chicago Park District's plan to replace the large limestone blocks around Promontory Point and elsewhere along the lakefront with a concrete and steel revetment is part of a long history of attempts to protect the city's shoreline from the ravages of the natural action of our great Lake Michigan. That history, however, is not well known bur the recent reconstruction of much of the beachfronc along South Lake Shore Drive has revealed artifacts of one of the earliest large-scale projects designed to keep the lake at bay along Jackson Park.

There is a strip of beach at about 58th Street between the sidewalk and Lake Michigan that, until

recently, was paved with a layer of five to twelve inch rectangular granite blocks that were quite visible to anyone who noticed them. Those blocks were cut and installed in 1887 and 1888 under the direction of the South Park Commission (SPC). Created in 1869 by the Illinois legislature, the SPC had come into existence largely through the lobbying efforts of Hyde Park founder Paul Cornell, later a commissioner for the district, and other prominent local associates. Its mission was to create and maintain a public park on 1057 acres of land that eventually would become Jackson Park, Washington Park, the Midway Plaisance and Gage Park. It was also empowered to establish and maintain 13.87 miles of boulevards,

including Grand Boulevard (now Marrin Luther ►8

Families enjoy the paved beach. In the background, benches line the paving. c. 1910

Deterioration of the paved beach provides insight into its construction. The Iowa Building can be seen in upper left of view. c. 1912

..:0 King Jr. Memorial Drive), Drexel Boulevard, and Garfield Boulevard. The latter is linked at its eastern end to Washington Park and to Gage Park (named for George W. Gage, an early South Park Commissioner) at its westernmost entrance. The SPC had, by any measure, a daunting responsibility. In its early years, the SPC was largely concerned with working out the legal issues and claims involved in assembling the land for the parks and laying the plans for the design of what was then named South Park.

The 593 acre portion of the South Park system that abutted the lake was initially called the Eastern Division, renamed Lake Park in 1875 and, finally, in 1881, Jackson Park, in honor of the seventh president of the United States. While the park was still largely unimproved in 1875, the pace of development of its landscaping and facilities began to quicken in the next five years. Following the suggestions of the district's first consulting landscape architects, Olmstead and Vaux, artificial lagoons were created inland that were intended to be the center of recreational use by the public. Bathing, for instance, was expected to cake place there rather than on the edge of Lake Michigan. Boating on the lagoons became a popular attraction and picnic areas became available to the public.

While the Olmstead and Vaux plan focused almost entirely on inland developments, the SPC's commissioners and engineers were acutely aware of the effect of the lake on the shoreline. Commissioner Cornell, for example, knew full well chat much of Hyde Park's first park, East End Park at 53rd Street,

had been washed away by the lake. (Andreas, p. 532). Confronting the erosive power of Lake Michigan on its shoreline early on, then, became a permanent part of the agenda of the park district's administrators.

Piers aimed, in part, at containing that power began to appear. In 1875, a pier and dock were constructed and extended 200 feet east into the lake at 59th Street. This pier was extended still further into the lake where it was intended not only to help offset the wave forces of the lake but also to serve as a departure and landing point for a steamer that ran between

Hyde Park and Chicago proper. Small brush and plank piers were also added.

The SPC's first large scale project to protect the lakefront began in 1877 when a submerged breakwater 2200 feet long was installed from the north line of the park at 56th Street to the 59th Street outlet. Materials used included "250 oak piles, 17,500

feet of oak lumber, 3618 oak stakes, 446 cords of cedar bark and 110 cords of limestone." On the surface, 10,160 cubic yards of sand were laid to create a "permanent" beach. (1877 SPC Report, p. 22). It would not be enough.

It soon became evident that the action of the lake was compromising these initial protection efforts. A new plan emerged that emphasized hardening the shoreline by paving the beach. Starting with the section from 56th Street to 59th Street in 1884 and completing it by 1888, this project would eventually extend south to 67th Street.(SPC Reporcs,1884, pp.11, 21-22 and 1890, pp. 23-24). Indeed, years of

r ii I I / w i II I ,. r 2 0 0 3

projects constructing concrete paved beach dtmw rf:rrn\--ersunn\-.r101r.ir L'ln:1k t" (l5 .fl-1'e>,e,..- 69th Street did not end until 1911. Thereafter, the south lake front work that began in earnest in the 1920s and continued into the late 1930s grew out of revised versions of Burnham's Plan of 1909.

The paved beach surface was constructed in two sections. The first section consisted of a seven foot wide strip filled with cedar bark and limestone bricks bordered by two rows of oak piles and oak stakes in a line that hugged the natural curved edge of the lakeshore under the water line. Behind it, on the beach, a second section of thousands of five to twelve inch oblong granite scones each varying in depth from a few inches to a foot were laid upon a supportive base in a mat that rose an average of 40 feet gradually from the lake to a higher level walkway. Sand, dredged from the various interior lagoons and carried o'n tracks to the beach by an open ore car or tram, was first laid under and lacer, in some areas, over these stones.

Ultimately, benches were set in place in a line along the upper edge of the paved beach for visitors to sit and enjoy the view and experience the comfort of being close to the lake. It was a place to see and, as well, be seen.

By the early 1900s, any attempt to keep these paved areas along the lake covered in sand appear to have been abandoned probably because the action of the lake, particularly during the winters, kept washing it away. The views accompanying this article, all dating from this later period, from 56th Street southward show chis paved beach without any sand at all. Despite

the fact that they were in place for many years, those &.Jnt..l-s- Ollil:i>Y (lJ L11K 1aA.t' ,s}rili.'"O.i o:ad =pd'.,a:C\..-d d:S chc base beneath them slipped or was undermined by the force of water and weather. In lacer years, extending the beaches further into the lake left the old paved areas behind, covered over by sand and weeds and, by and large, forgotten.

The remnants of this paved scrip were rediscovered by the Chicago Park District (CPD), the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) and the Jackson Park Advisory Council QPAC) in 2002 and identified for what they were. Initially, IDOT and the CPD planned to remove the stones but the JPAC successfully prevailed upon them to retain the paved area in its current shore reconstruction project. Two plans were developed by the Park District involving reinstallation of the rocks and presented to the JPAC for its advice and consent. The design the group recommended most resembled the paved beach as it appeared over 100 years ago.

A recent walk along the beach at 59th quickly revealed how vigorous an effort the Park District has launched to recapture chose granite bricks. Thousands of them have been unearthed and loaded carefully into ingeniously created 34 inch by 44 inch open boxes with molded pallets at their base and their sides made of wooden sheets held in place by steel strips. At last count, they were neatly arranged in 46 rows of from four to six boxes each enclosing an estimated 30 or more stones. Uncounted others are piled in mounds of dirt and, a Walsh Construction Company supervisor informed me, an unknown number of them remain ►G,

Tourist launch picking up passengers from the paved beach at 57th Street. The German Building is on the right, along with benches. c. 1913

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A view of the World's Columbian Exposition looking south along Lake Michigan from the northeast corner of the grounds. At the forefront is a rear view of the Iowa Building with its two sections clearly shown. The seawall, built in 1884, is to its left as is the first strip of the paved beach constructed in the 1880s. An elevated electric railway traversed the boundaries of the grounds and can be seen here passing the Iowa Building which was one of its stops. The Columbia Gallery, A Portfolio of Photographs from the World's Fair (Chicago, 1894)

-c:@ still to be unearthed. A tranquil expanse of sandy beach, from 58th Street past the 63rd Street Beach House lies grandly revealed, the tracks of heavy machinery of last summer's construction work softened by fall rains. Small purple and green bushes that have taken hold in the sand punctuate the view.

Some portion of these granite artifacts of those very early protection efforts by the official public guardians of our lakeshore will eventually be laid back in place, giving new generations of lakeshore visitors the opportunity to scroll down a version of that old promenade once again.

The Iowa Building

What is usually referred to today as the Iowa Building at 56th Street west of South Lake Shore Drive is really not the Iowa Building, at least not the original Iowa Building. In fact, the structure not only

doesn't look like the original Iowa building, it is also smaller and stands at a distance from where the original once stood. Nonetheless, it is still called the Iowa Building-not just by park enthusiasts, but by the Chicago Park District as well. The name is now so entrenched that no other has emerged to replace it.

The story of the Iowa Building goes back to the same time as those early plans to pave the beach. A large, .finely constructed seawall was built near the edge of the lake in 1884 in anticipation of the construction of a permanent public shelter for visitors in a "time of storm." The one story structure, designed by Daniel Burnham and completed in 1888, was built of granite with a slate roof. Aside from protecting the public from inclement weather, it was1also explicitly constructed to serve as a venue for dancing and musical entertainment. To that end, its interior was lined with maple from floor to ceiling and was said to

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be large enough to accommodate 2500 people.

While it must be emphasized that the construction of the Shelter had no direct relationship to the planning for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, tbe building's lasting fame came as a result of how it was used during the fair. Due to a mix-up, a site elsewhere on the grounds that was to be for the State of Iowa became unavailable and the WCE Commissioners offered Iowa's representatives the Jackson Park Shelter instead, with the sole proviso that it be left as found at the end of the fair. The site would be at the northeastern corner of the fairgrounds, almost on the lake. Recognizing this as a particularly attractive siring and an opportunity to reduce its construction costs, the Iowa Columbian Commission readily accepted the arrangement and set about converting it into a showplace for their state and its products. '

The Iowa commissioners then hired the Cedar Rapids architectural firm of Josselyn & Taylor to design Iowa's State Building for the fair. The architects proposed using the original shelter or east section, which was 80 feet by 120 feet running east to west, as the main exhibition hall. A second section, a three story building 60 feet by 112 feet extending further west, would be added on to western edge of the shelter, thereby increasing the size of the structure at ground level by 70 per cent. Viewed from the sourh, it would have the appearance of a single cohesive structure. The firm's plan was accepted by the Iowa Commission and approved by Daniel Burnham, Chief of Construction for the WCE commission. Bids were sought for construction and a contractor, presumably from Iowa, won with a bid of

$23,700. Josselyn and Taylor received another five percent of that amount for preparing the plans and superintending construction. The building was dedicated on October 22, 1892 and it formally opened on May 1, 1893 when the fair began.

The main entrance into the building was through the new west section, and faced the Palace of Fine Arts. The rest of the addition was devoted to the accommodation of the public and officials. Its first floor contained a reception hall, men's and ladies' parlors, a special room for Iowa's Governor and commissioners, a post office and parcel receiving room, smoking room, writing and waiting rooms and toilets. The second floor, set back from the entrance, consisted of a large meeting room approximately 37 by 50 feet that was used for an art exhibit and special events, a press room, a reporters' room, and four sleeping rooms for officials. Rooms for janitors were located on the truncated third floor.

The east section, the original shelter, was where the main exhibition hall was located and its decor was

intended to vividly display Iowa's agricultural .

productivity and vigor. On entering the hall, visirors discovered that its walls, ceilings and columns were covered almost entirely with colorful scenes and decorative designs made of small grains, seeds, grasses, corn shucks and colored corn kernels. Twelve hundred bushels of corn and three and a half car loads of other Iowa-grown products had been transported to Chicago to support this decorative natural extravaganza. Near the center of the hall was a scale model of the Iowa State Capitol building made of glass seeded with Iowa cereals. The model was made by the Chicago firm of Wells Glass Company and at the end of the fair was shipped to the Agricultural College at Ames, a predecessor of Iowa State University.

With the closing of 1893 Exposition, the added turrets and the rooms in the west section came down and the Jackson Park Shelter was returned to its original state, all those seeds presumably having been faithfully removed. It remained a part of the Jackson Park landscape until 1936 when it was demolished. Its demise coincided with a grand effort to widen what became South Lake Shore Drive, to extend the shoreline further into the lake, and then to defend it with a revetment made of large roughly hewn limestone blocks north and south along the lakefroot. While the Promontory Point was being completed and landscaped, construction on a new Jackson Park shelter, designed by E. V. Buchsbaum, was ordered in 1936 by the CPD and completed in 1937, funded by the federal Works Project Administration and a

$20,000 donation from the Museum of Science and Industry.

The 1937 shelter, the new Iowa Building, has a north/south orientation, not the roughly east/west siting of the original. With approximately 7104 square feet of ground space (approximately 74 feet by 96 feet), its footprint is 25 per cent smaller than the original shelter's 9600 square feet and only 43.5 per cent that of the actual Iowa Building at the time of the Exposition. It lacks the height, too, of its predecessor. Constructed largely of what is believed to be lannon limestone with exposed wooden beams above its interior walkways and a red shingle roof, its rustic appearance contrasts markedly with the more elegant French chateau-influenced style of Burnham's earlier design. The original shelter's replacement is far more open to the elements and has an unenclosed court lined with large gray flagstones. At its center, a small pool once allowed swimmers to wash sand off their feet. At one time refreshments were available at a concession stand there. The building stands somewhat west of the original sire and, unlike the f[rst shelter, is no longer on the lip of the lake. Comparing old and new maps at the CPD, most of the original site would appear to be under what is now the intersection of the

Drive at 56th Street. ►G,

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View of original shelter looking north. c. 1910

-< Aside from the name, the other characteristic that both buildings came to share is obsolescence. The new bathing facility built several years ago on the beach at 56th provides a range of services to swimmers and passersby that render the Iowa Building of limited use to the public-except perhaps as a shelter in rainy weather. The concessionaires are long gone. The restrooms are locked. No water spurts from within its little pool. At night, orange sodium vapor lights shine out from within to outline the exterior. If the structure were dramatically scaled down, it might fit into one of those miniature building tableaus that people put together at Christmas time or place alongside model train layouts. During recent summers, families have brought grills and picnicked in its shadow. At one period in the 1990s, teenagers constructed a skateboard ramp next to it. A statue from the WCE uncovered recently during the current roadwork may eventually be placed in its courtyard.

The proximity of the Iowa Building to a new underpass now under construction at 57th Street under the Outer Drive has led to discussions about transforming the building into something more functional than it is at present. Solidly intact and still handsome in its present isolation, the shelter remains a reference to architectural elements on Promontory Point and to the Alfred Caldwell era of landscape architecture.

Those big rocks along the lakefront, it should be noted, are the ones now being replaced during the

latest chapter in CPD attempts to preserve the lakefront and enhance accessibility to it. A ribbon of concrete along the lake on the North and South sides of Chicago is well on its way to being laid. The use and arrangement of those old blocks at Promontory Point are now at the center of the controversy that has brought into being the Promontory Point Community Task Force, for which the Hyde Park Historical Society acts as fiduciary partner. This

volunteer group has drawn over $62,000 in donations, over half from the Richard M. Dreihaus Foundation and the rest from private citizens. What began as a relatively informal, though emphatic protest has virtually institutionalized itself, at least for the moment, and the group is at this writing in

mediation meetings with the Park District.

Whatever the outcome of those negotiations, the so called "Save the Point" campaign has established an unusual chapter in community action in Hyde Park. It harks back to the days of urban renewal in the 1950s, the save-the-trees effort of 1965, and the Nike missile protests of the 1950s and again in the late 1960s. More recently, such efforts have coalesced with the founding of the Friends of the Park (1975), the Jackson Park Advisory Council (1983) and the Save International House campaign (2000). One of the signal strengths of Hyde Park lies in the reservoir of educated and sophisticated leadership it harbors, the financing its residents can muster and the history of

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community activism that marks its character.

Without reference to the specifics of aesthetic and recreational issues, the Promontory Point campaign seems to have thrived in part because of its focus on a symbol that sets Hyde Park apart from other parts of the city and promotes its singularity. International House meant something more than just a residence hall to supporters of its preservation. Today, Promontory Point seems to have been invested with a meaning beyond stone blocks, bike paths and rule breaking swimming outings. Such symbolism resonates almost viscerally with a significant segment of the Hyde Park community.

The mediated dialogue between the CPD and the Promontory Point Task Force leadership can be seen as an episode in the long public history of defining what our parks should be and how they should relate to and serve the public. Political action was present at the very birth of the park system. There were small parks in Chicago early in its history, some built by developers; Ease End Park was not unique. Creating parks on a much larger scale, however, involved developing a base of public support for the concept.

To give life to the idea, a network of political supporters had to be cobbled together capable of persuading the State legislature to establish the three part (South, West, and North) park system for the Chicago area. Accumulating the land for the parks

was also not a smooth process. From the beginning, conflict over the allocation of park funds, that is, the mediation between philosophy and practice, was a constant and remains so to this day. Historically speaking, then, some kind of political or negotiated process, has always been involved from inside and outside of the park's administrative system.

In recent years, while advocacy groups with relatively comprehensive agendas related to the Park system have been established, constituencies have also organized around specific parks or projects throughout the city. Historical preservation, moreover, has emerged as a major and sometimes confounding concern among the public, outside governmental agencies and within the CPD itself.

This has meant that the Park District, rich in technical talent and its planning expertise, has been confronted with having to develop new sensitivities and to display public relations skills of a rather high order. The larger historical question, however, is how complex entities like the Chicago Park District and its predecessors have sec their mission, planned their work, obtained funds and made decisions about how to allocate them, and adjusted generally to political, economic and social changes in the city of which they

are so integral a part. Imm

Sources and further reading, see page 9.

Iowa Building looking northwest. The original shelter on the right and addition on the left. The Book of the Fair, 1895

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Wooded Island:

In Memoriam

by Doug Anderson

The following is a love story about a tree. If you don't like trees, you'd better nor bother to read on.

At about 4am on July 5th, I was awakened by the sound of thunder and lightening. I looked through my south-facing window and saw an amazing display of lightening bolts shooting horizontally across the sky and occasionally toward the ground. It was raining heavily, and the wind was pushing the rain in a horizontal direction toward the east. I was witnessing a major thunder storm coming through Jackson Park.

The storm was over by Sam when I headed for the Clarence Darrow Bridge to start my usual bird/nature walk through the Paul H. Douglas Nature Sanctuary (Wooded Island) behind the Museum of Science and Industry. As I approached the bridge I saw the first evidence of a major disaster ahead. A huge, 60 foot Green Ash tree, probably the largest of its kind in Jackson Park, was lying on its side just east of the bridge. Several months earlier I had aged that tree with a formula provided by arborists at the Morton Arboretum. It had started from a seed in 1853-the same year that Paul Cornell founded the community of Hyde Park.

The real shock took hold as I entered Wooded Island just to the south of the Darrow Bridge. It looked like a tornado had gone through it. I counted over fifty trees, including many of the largest and oldest on the

island, that were completely blown over. There were at least seventy-five more trees that were standing like skeletons completely stripped of their major branches, including the only Horse Chestnut on the island that may have been planted by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1892-93 when he designed the island and planted hundreds of trees there for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Since I had started bird/nature walks on the island almost thirty years ago, I had admired that Horse Chestnut for the migrating humming birds that were attracted to its flowers each May. It bad stood fifty feet high, and now stood only twenty-five feet as all the upper branches had been stripped off by the storm. There must have been hundreds of birds and nests that were destroyed by the storm. The worst was yet to come.

As I made my way through tangled branches and over fallen trunks of numerous maples, ashes, basswoods and cottonwods that littered the sidewalk around the island, I came upon the tree that I had known and loved for over sixty years. It was a mighty Burr Oak that had stood about sixty-five feet high,

Doug Anderson greets visitors to Wooded Island's Bird/Nature walks.

with a crown that spread ninety feet across. I bad aged that tree to 273 years of age. It bad sprouted from an acorn in 1730. I knew it was the oldest oak in Jackson Park, and later found out from the chief forester in the Chicago Park District that it was probably the oldest oak in the entire city.

I bad first discovered this tree in 1943 after my family had moved back to Chicago from Los Angeles. I quickly found Wooded Island, only a few blocks from my home, and it became my "jungle" as I grew up. As a nine-year-old, my main interest was climbing trees, and the oak was my favorite since it had a low branch chat angled near the ground and was easy to get into.

When I got high into that oak, I felt like Tarzan or, more appropriately, his son, "Boy," who was about my age. I went to all the Tarzan movies that played constantly in the early 1940s in the many theaters along 63rd street in Woodlawn, and it was not difficult transferring Tarzan's life in the trees to my fertile imagination on Wooded Island. Johnny Weissmuller was my boyhood hero.

After my tree-climbing days were over, I was introduced to the bird life of Wooded Island in 1950 by a biology teacher at Hyde Park High School. I gravitated to my favorite oak, and was enthralled by the many birds I saw in that tree over the years.

By 1974, when Alderman Len Despres encouraged me to start group bird walks on the island, my favorite oak had grown to massive proportions, with a trunk three feet in diameter. For the past twenty-nine plus years I have continued these walks, always pointing out my favorite oak tree, telling of its history

f.ull/\Vlnlcr 2 0 0 J

and reminding everyone chat it would probably live to be five hundred years old. I loved chat tree more than anything else in nature.

When I came upon the tree chat July Sch morning, I couldn't believe it when I saw it lying on the ground, covering a third of the entire island's width. I shed a few tears for the first time in my life over a fallen tree. It had been snapped off like a toothpick near its base by winds of 88 mph - hurricane force - by a

microburst with downdrafcs of winds chat rushed in an easterly direction felling 450 trees in Washington and Jackson Parks. Such events are often called "horizontal tornadoes." It cut a half-mile swath through all of Wooded Island. There are now high openings where trees once stood. The island has now taken on more of the character of the oak savannah that it was back in the 1800s. Many saplings will be planted to replace the lost trees, but it will cake many years before they mature.

le was decided at a recent meeting of the Jackson Park Advisory Council to recommend to the Park District to leave most of the famous oak's trunk where it fell. It could become a "nurse" tree, allowing other trees and plants to grow out of the decomposing wood over time. There is also the possibility that "suckers' might grow from the huge rot system left by che tree, creating more oaks in its place. I won't live long enough to see this happen, but perhaps the bird watchers and nature lovers 25 or 50 years from today will witness chis happening, and will begin another love affair with offspring of my beloved tree! lmil]

Selected sources and further reading:

Main entrance, Iowa Building 1893

Selected sources and further reading: A.T. Andreas, A History of Cook County Illinois (Chicago: 1884) Annual Reports to the South Park Commissioners, (Chicago: 1877-1911); Julia S. Bachrach, "Jackson Park Design Evolution," C.P.D. working paper, Chicago: 1995); Barry Bluescone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, Conn.: 1991), Report of the Iowa Columbian Commission (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: 1893); H.H. Bancroft, The Book of the Fair, Vol. II (Chicago: 1895); Rossiter Johnson, ed. A History of the World's Columbian Exposition, Vol. II, New York: 1897); Olmstead, Vaux and Company, Report Accompanying Plan for Laying Out South Park (Chicago: South Park Commission, 1871); Promontory Point Advisory Group Income Statement, October 21 and December 16, 2003. There are published

biographies of Olmstead and Burnham. See also

Galen Cranz, "Models for Park Usage: Ideology and the Development of Chicago's Public Parks" University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, 1971). Thanks for assistance are due to Julia S. Bachrach of the CPD's Department of Planning and Development and Robert Middaugh, CPD's archivist. HPHS board members Bert Benade, Devereux Bowly, and Jack Spicer also provided information in the preparation of this article, as did the JPAG's Nancy Hays and Gary Osswaarde.

Contemporary measurements, box counts and interpretations are the responsibility of the author. Postcard views are from private collection.

Stephen A. Treffman is Archivist for the Society and contrib11ting editor to Hyde Park History.

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HPHS Annual Meeting 2004

Held on February 28th at the Quadrangle Club, the meeting brought out 154 guests including honorees Ken Dunn and Tim Black, the well-known Studs Terkel, and Lonnie Bunch, director of the Chicago Hiscorical Society. Our new president, Carol Bradford, presided and presented a special gift of thanks to out going president Alice Schlessinger.

This year's Paul Cornell Award was presented to Ken Dunn by Bert Benade. The citation read "to Ken Dunn for making recycling known way beyond our city" ( story follows). The Jean Block Award was presented to Tim Black by Nickie Stein, chair of the Block Award Committee, for his recently published and acclaimed book, Bridges of Me//lory. Chicago's First

Wave of Black Migration.

Ken Dunn's Story

en grew up on a Kansas farm and came to our community to study at the Chicago Theological

Seminary. But his Mennonite belief, that one must work to receive earth's sacred bounty, led him to

State Senator Barbara Flynn Currie congratulates Tim Black on his winning the Society's Jean Block Award.

The 2004 Paul Cornell Award is presented to Ken Dunn by Bert Benade, Chairman: Cornell Award Committee

switch to the University of Chicago. His thesis advisor was Richard McKeon who taught that ideas must lead to action. This concept led Ken to become aware of all the throw-away stuff that had real value if it could be tapped into. He quit school to try recycling as a way of using what he saw as potentially valuable resources.

Early in his effort he set up recycling bins-some

in our shopping center parking lot. And he showed up at the Hyde Park Garden Fair with a can-crusher offering children a penny for each empty can gathered up and crushed. Our kids were taught an early lesson in recycling.

He also tapped into manufacturing companies and collected materials that came from overruns or leftovers from completed orders This led to setting up a Resource Center where teachers, scout leaders, and others could get materials for creative and learning projects, books for libraries, even furniture for class rooms. He would accept almost anything and find a way to make it useful.

Ken realized that another wasted resource was all the rubble strewn about on empty city lots-lots ►8

-c0 that could become vegetable gardens for the communities surrounding them. This led ro a successful program of community involvement and pride, and a way of earning cash for gardening volunteers and providing good food for the local people.

He started a mulch-producing facility for these gardens which has prospered and grown. He also set up a program of giving throw-away bicycles to poor kids, but only after they had learned how to rebuild them and keep them in repair. This too is a flourishing enterprise. Ken has promoted other such programs with the same enthusiasm.

Ken's efforts and successes were mixed in the early days, with some tough times for the family and their three kids, but they made it and their future is bright. He has not yet returned to school for his graduate degrees, but he has found a life work of social, ethical and moral value that will be hard to beat. We applaud his impact on our lives, our city and beyond.

-Bert Benad.e

How Delightful to Live in Hyde Park!

President Carol Bradford thanks out-going President Alice Schlessinger

The evening's entertainment:

Hyde Parkey-ana:

A Musical History of Hyde Park

Songs organized and directed by Bob Ashenhurst (who has so often entertained us Hyde Parkers) were sung by Helen Bailey, Bernie Brown, Bill Crowl, Trip Driscoll, Jana French, Isabel Guzman-Barron, and Sasha Schmidt.

Lyrics to two of the songs performed, both by Ned Rosenheim, follow. The mttsic for the first, from the 1959 Quadrangle Club Revels, was written by Shirley Ginther. Music for the second was composed by Bob Ashenh11rst, presented at the 1981 annual meeting of the Historical Society.

HOUSEHOLD SUPPLIES

S11ng by Helen Bailey and Bernie Brown He:

As a poor unwanted bachelor and solitary man,

I believed that gracious living could be purchased by the can.

So I dropped into the Co-Op just to browse among the lines

That are offered by Del Moore and by Campbell and by Heinz.

I remember contemplating a display of peanut butter,

When afar I glimpsed a profile and my heart began to flutter.

I dashed past meat and Cream of Wheat and just beyond the Duz,

Divinely framed in Sani-Flush, my one and only was.

Love came to me in the Household Supplies I found romance 'midst the Vei-

l was bereft of my heart near the Drefr

It was love at first sight, I could tell.

Deep in her eyes I could read "Family Size" Clear as the ring of a bell-

My S.O.S. was rewarded with "Yes..." That day in the Household Supplies.

She:

I am truly oh so grateful that I want to sing and shout,

For that happy day I noticed that the Tide was running our.

And I hurried to the Co-Op in a spirit chat was urgent Though a girl may lack a husband, she relies on her

detergent.

Now, I can't pretend my heart was not without romance and hope,

Yet my principal objective was-let's face it-mainly soap.

While searching for a new pink kind I'd heard was rather good,

I turned around by happenstance, and there my hero scood.

Love came to me in the Household Supplies, Passing right by Mr. Clean-

Flanked by Saran Wrap, I felt a man wrap Me close in his arms as his queen.

Who could devise a more Cheer-ful surprise? All lovers know what I mean-

I felt a glow 'neath the Ivory Snow, That day in the Household Supplies.

Both:

Love came co us in the Household Supplies, Lux was the light that came true-

Walled in by lots of that product of Scott's I fell a pris'ner to you.

Prices may rise just as high as the skies, Rinso turn red, white and blue-

Powder or flake, you're the one I shall cake, My most priceless of Household Supplies Household Supplies....

HOW DELIGHTFUL TO LIVE IN HYDE PARK

Sung by ensemble

How delightful co live in Hyde Park, It's Elysian, and that's categorical With its saints and its sinners,

Its Nobel Prize winners,

And also, its aspects historical.

How enchanting to live in Hyde Park

With its homes that Jean Block has made notable Her fine book, "Hyde Park Houses," the critic allows is Definitive, and yet highly quotable.

Not a house, but still worth celebration, With a call of "Come on, all aboard!"

Is what once was a passenger station And today, praises be, is restored.

Helen Bailey and Bernie Brown

So we're graceful we live in Hyde Park, 'Stead of some place of doubtful propriety-

Such as Houston or Austin, New Haven or Boston, Vincennes, Ashtabula, Sioux Falls or Missoula, Cheyenne, Albuquerque, or even more quirky (spoken) Locations like:

Las Vegas, Nevada Scottsdale, Arizona Honolulu, Haveyee- La Hoyaah, California

Kenneebunkport, Maine Chappaqua, New Yawk Crawford, Tayuhxas-

Those picturesque places, whatever their graces,

Just simply can't boast of one thing we think most of The Hyde Park Historical Society!

Studs Terkel greets HPHS members

Photographs by Fredric Stein-Thank You!

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The Civi I ian D-Day: Sel Iing War Bonds from the Air

by Stephen A. Treffman

One summer day during World War II, a huge load of one-page salmon colored leaflets came fluttering down over Hyde Park. The sky was filled with them. At the time, my mother and I were walking south along Kenwood Avenue at 54th Street near the playground of what is now Murray School. The sight of all that paper falling from the sky was·, to my young eyes, absolutely breathtaking. When I would later learn the term "manna from heaven," I would immediately know what it was because I had personally experienced it!

Of course I made strides to gather up as many as I could of these marvelous gifts floating down upon us only ro be abruptly captured by my mother's hand. Somehow, I was given to understand that I should leave the papers on the ground and that we should go home right away. As we scurried off, I looked back longingly at the sight of all those wonderful pieces of paper far from my grasp but forever fixed in my memory. Their mysterious purpose and message, however, would remain unknown to me for another 60 years.

At a recent paper collectibles trade show I was going through a seller's wares when I suddenly came upon a tablet sized sheet, salmon in

color. As soon as I read it, I knew what it was! There before me was a copy of one of those leaflets that had been floating down on Hyde Park that memorable summer day so long ago.

Finally, I learned what it was that had so captured my attention. The mystery was solved! The sheet, printed on one side in English and on the other side in German, turned out to be a promotion to sell War Bonds.

"Citizens of Chicago!" it proclaimed, "This harmless piece of paper was dropped from an airplane. It COULD have been an enemy's bomb bringing death and destruction, or a propaganda leaflet

spreading disunity and bewilderment among us. That it is

neither, is due to the skill, courage and sacrifice of our fighting men now invading Europe."

"When the War Bond Warden in your Block calls, during the Fifth War Loan Drive, welcome him in.

Then dig into your savings and buy EXTRA war bonds! Put it over the 100% mark! If you have bought war bonds since June 1st where you work or anywhere else, fill out the Red, White and Blue Credit Slip which the War Bond Warden will have. Then your block will receive full credit for all bonds you buy, wherever you buy them!"

The name of its sponsor was affixed: "Chicago and Cook County War Finance Committee, 5th War Loan, Philip R. Clarke, Chairman."

I wouldn't have been able to understand the leaflet's message even if I had snagged one because, unfortunately, at the time, I had no reading skills and wouldn't have had a clue as to what a bond was even if I could read. While I was entranced by the sight of these things, older members of the community may well have viewed them as so much waste paper they would have

to be picking up from their lawns, backyards and roofs in the succeeding days and weeks ahead.

Although the leaflet was undated, the text suggested that it must have been produced sometime after the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and I used that as the major clue as I set off to learn more of its story. I soon discovered that the leaflet was one of a million that were dropped over Chicago by a single air transport plane on June 12, 1944 as part of the kick-off for a nationwide Fifth War Bond Drive to raise $16 Billion dollars. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would describe it as the "Civilian D-Day."

There were eight such drives during the war. The fifth ran from June 12 to July 31, 1944. Chicago and Cook County's goal was set at $894,014,000, "the greatest financial undertaking" ever launched in the city. One hundred thousand local volunteers would take part in the drive, 16,500 of them working as Block Bond Wardens who, in turn, supervised the house to house canvassing

work of tens of thousands of Block Captains.

In Hyde Park, leadership for the drive fell ro Commander George X. Rosenthal, head

of the Hyde Park branch for the city's Office of Civil Defense. Its goals for the community were 14,440 subscriptions and bond sales of

$4,860,075. Each of his zone wardens was given a specific quota and, in turn, they apportioned them out to their local block

s,,,.:nr1 200,1.

captains in the Hyde Park, Kenwood and Oakland neighborhoods. The latter were charged with canvassing every

resident in their block. A red, white, and blue poster "thermometer" was placed on every corner to illustrate the progress of the drive for that block and kept up co date so that residents could see the progress of his or her block and compare it to the success ocher blocks were achieving.

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR's Secretary of the Treasury, had initially proposed and organized the sale of

-v•

subscriptions totaling $1.16 billion, 76.1% coming from corporations and 23.9% from individuals. Hyde Park's residents purchased bonds totaling

$4,722,961. In addition to house to house canvassing efforts, bonds were also sold at booths located in the community's major hotels. The Windemere Hotels sold a total of $107,000, the Flamingo,

$87,627, the Shoreland, $65,206, the Mayfair, $42,542, and the Sherry,

$21,000. Local clubs also were very active in selling bonds during the drive. Members of the Hyde Park Kiwanis Club alone raised an amazing $575,000

government bonds to the public early

,..---· in war bond sales that summer. The

in 1941 to help finance the enormous procurement costs involved in gearing up our military to a defensive war

--·-

Jewish Men's Club of Hyde Park sold

$64,050 in bonds.

With chat old leaflet in hand, I was reminded of

footing. Aware that many Americans were reluctant to see the country embrace war, Morgenthau argued that the government ought "to use bonds to sell the war." He said, "Promoting and selling the bonds would make the country 'war-minded' and give (the public) the opportunity to do something" co support their country and the men and women entering military service after Pearl Harbor.

A remarkable marketing barrage in support of the bond campaigns was launched throughout the media financed largely through donations of advertising by companies and public-spirited individuals. The public was urged to buy bonds in defense of American liberty and democracy, as safe havens of investment for themselves, to support our troops and keep the planes flying, co tamp inflationary pressures, or as one bank's ad suggested, to put "bullets in the bellies of Hitler's (or Hirohito's) hordes." High-minded and rational appeals, then, were mixed with references to more basic, even base, motives of hatred, vengeance and racism, particularly coward the Japanese.

As the war progressed, the American economy expanded dramatically. From 1939 ro 1944, the Gross Domestic Produce and disposable personal income both more than doubled as seventeen million new jobs were added to the economy. When the Fifth War Bond drive began, then, Americans not only had money in their pockets co buy the bonds but also had reason co believe that, vigorously pursued, victory would soon be won. The result was that by the time the drive ended it had raised a record $20.6 billion dollars nationwide.

Chicago and Cook County's 1944 Fifth War Bond drive surpassed its goals with bond sales and

chose quietly elegant blue star flags (family members in military service) and chose, less often seen, with gold stars (family members who had given their lives) that had hung so prominently in neighbors' windows back then. The American Gold Scar Mothers organization still exists, its potential membership, sadly, growing now on a daily basis. We celebrate their day the last Sunday of every September. After

the war, cement poses with plagues memorializing the community's dead soldiers, sailors, and airmen could be found on some of the same Hyde Park corners where chose bond drive thermometers had stood. In time, chose flags came down from their window frames while the cement poses and plaques on the srreecs deteriorated and most of chem simply disappeared. One bronze plaque still stands on the northwest corner of 55th and South Shore Drive in memory of Navy Lt. Arthur W. Klein. He was born in 1905 and died in service in 1944, the same year I had been so enthralled by those pieces of paper floating down from the sky.

June 6, 2004 is the 60th anniversary of 0-Day.

Selected Sources: Chicago Tribune, June 12, August 8, 1944, Hyde Park Herald, June 8, August 10, 1944. John Morton Blum, V was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War 11 (New York, 1976); Access On-Line Project "Brief History of World War Two Advertising Campaigns: War Loans and Bonds", John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University Rome Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library@

http://scriptorium.Iib.duke.edu/adaccess/warbonds.htmI

s,,r,119 2004

Selections from

As Others See Chicago*

Edited by Bessie Louise Pierce

CHICAGO, THE AMAZING

by George Warrington Steevens

October, 1896

Chicago, queen and guttersnipe of cities, cynosure and cesspool of the world! Not if I had a hundred tongues, every one shouting a different language in a different key, could I do justice to her splendid chaos.

... It will be well worth your while again to go South to Washington Park and Jackson Park, where the World's Fair was held. Chicago, straggliug over a hundred and eighty-six square miles was rather a tract of houses than an organic city until somebody conceived the idea of coupling her up with a ring of parks connected by planted boulevards. The southern end of the system rests on the Lake at these two parks. Chicago believes that her parks are unsurpassed in the world, and certainly they will be prodigiously fine when they are finished. Broad drives and winding alleys, ornamental trees, banks and beds of flowers and flowering shrubs, lakes and ornamental bridges, and turf that cools the eye under the fiercest noon-you bet your life Chicago's got 'em all.

And also, Chicago has the Art Building, which is the one remaining relic of the Fair, and surely as divinely proportioned an edifice as ever filled and satisfied the eye of man. It is now the Field Columbian Museum, having been endowed by a leading citizen of that name with a cool million dollars. Other gifts, with dividends contributed by holders of exhibition stock, brought up the total to half as much again. Chicago has a University hard by, the University of Chicago, which has come out westward, like Mahomet co the mountain, co spread light among the twenty-five million souls that live within a morning's journey of Chicago. This University has not been in existence for quite five years; in that time it has received in benefactions from citizens of this place nearly twelve million dollars.

Think of it, depressed Oxford and Cambridge-a University endowed at the rate of half a million sterling a year!

* Bessie Louise Pierce, Ed. As Others See Chicago. Impressions of Visitors. 1673-1933 University of Chicago Press, 1933.

PROMENADE EN AMERIQUE

by]J. Ampere (son of Andre Marie Ampere, French scientist who gave his ncnne to one of the meamrements of electricity) visited Chicago in 1851

People had especially urged me co go to Chicago ...

Chicago is not a great city like Sr. Louis, but it was pointed out to me as very curious in the rapidity of its progress, and its situation on the border, so to speak, of civilization, at least in this region. A railroad leads right to Lake Michigan, having traversed great forests cut up by ponds and little rivers. You arrive in the evening at the edge of the lake (Michigan City, Indiana), you cross it on a steamboat during the night, and the next morning you find yourself in Chicago.

The hotel to which I went (Tremont House) is one of the largest and best in the United States; they tell me that the propriecor was, a few years ago, a tailor in the backwoods; he went bankrupt and came co Chicago, where, with his brother he sold trousers at fifty cents a pair; now he has built the magnificent hotel which one is quite astonished co find here by Lake Michigan.

The aspect of this lake is as wild as its name... before me there extended into the lake a long wooden pier; the planks and joists are half broken; there remains just what is necessary, nothing more. The city lies there like a boat stranded on the shore. Nearby is the suburb which is inhabited by the well-to-do citizens of Chicago. Here there are beautiful walks and frame houses with white columns, and elegant porticoes, all surrounded by gardens full of flowers. One of these houses is at the center of a veritable park. I see beautiful conservatories. Am I still beside lake Michigan?

Another house is that of Mr. Ogden, to whom I have been referred .... Noone is better acquainted with the city, as he saw its birth and helped to make

it ... There are thirty-six churches in Chicago; here are six public schools, in which are instructed three thousand children.

Before leaving Chicago I wanted at least a glimpse of the prairie... I rook a train which traverses it for a certain distance... and got off at a station in the midst of a deserted region. There is no post office, not one house, not a tree. Not a noise, not a movement ... Having spent two hours in the heart of this limitless space, I hear the distant noise of a train and I come back to Chicago, where I arrive in time to pass a very agreeable evening listening to music and having ices in the charming home of Mr. Ogden.

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Th.ts i.ssue o,-1

Hyde Park History begins the 26th year of its publication.

Wonder what we were up to 25 years ago?

From Volume 1, No. 1: January, 1979

1978 IN REVIEW

JAN 27: Annual meeting and dinner, Windermere Hotel...

Cost: $10 per person

John Vinci will have completed his proposal for the renovation of our headquarters, the old cable car station. . .

JAN 29: Arthur Weinberg spoke on "Clarence Darrow As a Literary Figure" A fresh approach to the biography of a famous lawyer, Hyde Park resident.

MAR 14: A report on the status of proposals to designate parts of the community as historic districts or to list them on the National Register by Dev Bowley and Michael Conzen. An exceptionally large crowd attended. . .

SEPT 17: Excursion by bus-in 1Cact three buses-to "Sunday on Prairie Avenue, 1893", the official opening of the Prairie Avenue Historic District. . . most popular attraction: that modern rarity, an organ grinder man, complete with monkey.

OCT 29: Sunday Afternoon sherry reception for Paul A. Cornell and other HPHS Charter members. Speech by Mr. Cornell about his grandfather, the Paul Cornell who founded Hyde Park. At the following social hour, descendants of early Hyde Park families were welcomed as special guests.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

High Tech Hits Home

At HPHS, we study the past, but we don't live in it. For three years or so we have maintained a website (hydeparkhistory.org) which has become an important part of what we do. Designed and maintained by Hyde Parker Julie Richman, the site lists past and coming events (hydeparkhistory.org.events.html), holds a nearly-complete collection of our monthly Hyde Park Herald articles (hydeparkhistory.org/herald) and a growing number of Newsletter articles going back some twenty years (hydeparkhistory.org/newsletter).

Members interested in researching local architecture will find help at hydeparkhistory.org/preservation and students entering the HPHS Neighborhood History Contest will find what they need with just a click.

What are some titles you might find on our site? There are 24 Herald articles including Sue

Purrington's remini ence of Harold Washington, Vi Urecz's "Miracle on Wooded Island"and Abner

Mikva's article on George Anastaplo. All are linked to hydeparkhistory.org/herald. And we have George Anascaplo's memoir "If You're as Good as You Look, Why Aren't You A University of Chicago Professor?" to which he added, for HPHS, appendices on Calvin Sawyer, Robert Hutchins and Edward Levi. It can be found at hydeparkhistory.org/herald/anastoplo-calk.pdf and is simply unavailable anywhere else.

Our Newsletter page now lists more than 25 important articles. You might remember, and enjoy reading again, "Eighty Years in Hyde Park" by Leon Despres (1991), "Mary Todd Lincoln's Sad Summer 10 Hyde Park" by Jim Stronks (1998) or "Earl B. Dickerson and Hyde Park" by Robert Blakely (1986). They are all linked to hydeparkhistory.org/newsletter.

HPHS board member Iris Frank has catalogued all the Newsletter articles and linked her list to chat same page. If you find something in Iris' catalog that we haven 'c put on line, she will photocopy and send it to you for a nominal fee. And, if you have suggestions for improving our website, please send them (via the web, of course) to information@hydeparkhistry.org.

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Grace Green, a freshman at St. Ignatim High School, submitted her project on Alfonso Iannelli to the Chicago Metro History Fair. It was judged the best entry in the Fair that was related to Hyde Park. At the History Fair final awards ceremony, Grace was awarded $1 00 by Priya Shimpi on behalf of the Hyde Park Historical Society.

The project which Grace submitted was a large standing exhibit with many pictures and m11ch accompanying text. The following essay was put together from the text1tal part of her display by jay Mulberry.

ALFONSO IANNELLI

By Grace Green

First Place Winner in the 2004 Hyde Park Historical Society Neighborhood History Contest

As a native of Italy, Iannelli is a classic example of the American Dream. As early as ten years old he had immense desire to work in the arcs and America seemed to be the key to ultimate success. From New York to Los Angeles and eventually Chicago, his final resting place, he made an indelible mark across the American landscape. His artistic philosophy was chat held by ocher famous Chicago architects and artists of the time: Organicism. His style however was all his own, a mixed bag of Americana, German, Art Deco, Prairie and many more. Alfonso Iannelli, although not well known, had an everlasting effect on the city of Chicago and the world through his innovative works.

Alfonso Iannelli was born in Andretta, Province of Avelino, 100 miles southeast of Naples, Italy in 1888. Soon after he was born, his father left his young family for America promising co send for them when he became successful. His mother meanwhile stayed at home, running an inn until she received word that they would be soon going to America, Newark, New Jersey most specifically.

At ten years of age, Alfonso Iannelli realized the

first part of his dream, to live in America. His new life was quite a shock, from a sunny southern Italian town with simple whitewashed buildings to Newark in

Board member Priya Shimpi and prize winner Grace Green

1898, an up-and-coming industrial city overwhelmed in gray smoke. Iannelli went to public school but when his father's business collapsed he was forced at age 13 to leave school. His father arranged an apprenticeship at a jeweler's shop where Iannelli learned to engrave. A special scholarship to the Newark Technical School made it possible for him to study there in the evenings and work in the shop during the day. In 1906, he won a scholarship for the Arc Student League, a first for any student of the Newark School. At seventeen, he moved to New York City co study under George B. Bridgman and Gutzon Borglum at the Art Students League. It was then that Iannelli truly realized his gift and began the next phase of his life as a fullcime artist and student.

Ac the Art Students League, Alfonso Iannelli was first given exposure to the New York Arc world. His day teacher George B. Bridgman's effect on Iannelli was impressive. "Masses of about the same size or proportion are conceived not as masses, but as one mass; those of different proportions, in respect to their movement, are conceived as wedging into each. The effective conception is wedging," Bridgman was often quoted. This firm anatomical style and the concept of wedging was seen often in lannelli's lacer works including the "Sprites" he sculpted for the Midway Gardens.

It was lannelli's night teacher, Guczon Borglum ►@

-c:@ of Mt. Rushmore fame, who had the most profound affect on Iannelli and was his first official collaborator. Two months after setting foot in New York City and studying at the Art Students League, Iannelli was asked to work directly with Borglum in his studios. Iannelli jumped at the chance to continue learning from his teacher in a more hands-on atmosphere. Borglum's romantic and idealistic style was attractive to Iannelli and, as immigrants drawn to the American Dream, they both held similar views concerning the possibilities of

the American West. Indigenous American art was a favorite of both, and Borglum once said, "The glory that once was Greece. I would throw it in the Atlantic Ocean-why? To give the Americans courage to say what they have to say." In his first days working at the studio, Iannelli proved not only a like mind, but also a capable artist.

In one year, Iannelli won the St.

Gaudens prize for sculpture and Borglum's prize in composition, design and sculpture. The climax of his time with Borglum came when he assisted Borglum on the sculpture for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for five months. Borglum's final words after the end of the

project formed a piece of advice that would continually ring in Iannelli's ears throughout his life: "Be simple, listen to your own impulses and work, work quietly and thoughtfully."

Iannelli 's early fascination with the American West pushed him

to find employment there rather than move back to Europe. His first major art move was to Los Angeles in 1910 where he taught, and helped to create the School of American Art. His acceptance of a poster commission from the Orpheum Vaudeville Theatre was a "big break". He was commissioned to do four posters, and as each was produced, his creative ability was revealed. Word spread and a meeting was set up with his next collaborators John Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright (the sons of Frank Lloyd Wright) and Barry Byrne (an employee of the Wright studio from 1902- 1909).

The group got along well with Iannelli and asked him to carry out a sculpture commission for the Spreckels Organ Pavilion at the Panama Pacific Exposition alongside John Lloyd Wright. It was John Lloyd Wright who first exposed Iannelli to his father's work and eventually it was he who set up the meeting between his friend and his father.

It was on February 12, 1914, that a Western Union day letter arrived for Iannelli from John Lloyd Wright: "Could you work in Chicago on models for

concert garden now under construction if I could arrange matters satisfactorily here. Two or three months building must be complete by June tenth." The "concert hall" was Midway Gardens, Frank Lloyd Wright's first major public building in Chicago. Located in Woodlawn at the southwest corner of Cottage Grove Avenue and East Sixtieth Street, the Midway Gardens was created as a "concert garden"-a Germanic

form of architecture consisting of both indoor and outdoor restaurants and a music pavilion. Entitled the "winter" and "summer" gardens, the winter garden had a covered pavilion whereas the summer garden had an open band shell. lannelli's work on the gardens was extensive and was a turning point in his career.

Iannelli was commissioned to design multiple sculptures and worked along closely with Wright to design them. Wright exchanged his ideas of Japanese

and German designs with Iannelli, which helped to form the eventual look of the pieces. The most well known of the pieces Iannelli created, as well as one of the most recognizable symbols of the Gardens, were Iannelli's Sprites. He also designed the Spindles (small ornaments on the fences surrounding the Gardens, as well as along the inside), the Queen of the Gardens, and a drowning form found hidden in the entrance hall called the Maid of the Mud.

During their early meetings, Wright and Ianelli got along well. Wright's unique genius bewitched Ianelli as it had many others:

"Seeing Mr. Wright's work, the first time, staying at Mr. Wright's home in Oak Park, experiencing the way I felt in his house, buildings on a winter night snow covered, the romance of this new simple statement of housing-there was something magic about it. The plans for living, at that time new, were awakening me co a new consciousness of what habitation can be co humans."

It was not long, however, before their relationship became rocky. Debates on design and attribution were heated. An example of their futile relationship is that as Iannelli was working on the Maid of the Mud, Wright secretly ripped off the drop cloth on the unfinished sculpture and smashed two holes in the face. Iannelli declared "the whole thing is a failure and of no sculptural value," blaming the ruination on the architect's meddling. After the completion of the building, Iannelli and Wright exchanged numerous letters debating the attribution of the sculptures.

Iannelli, always bitter about the project, was about co stare on a book about the Gardens before his death.

Despite his relations with Wright, Iannelli loved Chicago and he and his wife, Margaret, chose to settle in Park Ridge. Margaret was an artist in her own right and her husband's closest collaborator. Their careers took off together but hers ended tragically when she suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of a child in 1929. She was hospitalized and never released, bur she continued to be an influence on Iannelli who brought his commissions to her hospital room and took her advice seriously.

After settling in Chicago, Alfonso Iannelli began to work with Barry Byrne who had also worked with Wright on Midway Gardens. Their work between 1923 and 1928 included a series of church and school buildings. The most spectacular of these was the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle in Chicago. The church is located at 5472 South Kimbark Avenue and was built in 1922. The interior of the church is square, as Byrne was opposed to the traditional rectangle found in Church designs. Iannelli helped Byrne to develop his modern design technique eliminating a need for support pillars, giving an unobstructed view from all angles. Iannelli was specifically responsible for some of the external brickwork that was done in a way that helped soften the corners using a zigzag pattern. Iannelli also designed the entrance, which used chevron as well as his modern sculpture. The overall effect gives a Spanish flavor to the exterior.

This project did not go smoothly and many pares of the building were completed later with no regard to

the architectur,d design. Nevertheless, this church is one of the best illustrations of how successful the collaboration between these two men was. Many design elements of this Church are also seen in St.

Xavier in Wilmette. Barry Byrne described this sort of complete collaboration as "being like dancing, with the lead shifting back and forth depending on the specific need." Iannelli described the same thing in the catalog for his 1925-26 exhibit at the Arc Institute as, "the reasonable way is the artistic way.

Arc is the sense of fitness."

Chicago helped Iannelli realize how much he enjoyed Industrial Design. So much in fact, that he even tried

to create his own industrial design school in connection with Hull House in 1923. While teaching at the ►e

St. Thomas the Apostle Church

Terra cotta cornice, towers and window settings by Iannelli

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-ct) Chicago Art Institute in the same year, he prepared a program for the establishment of an Industrial Design Department. With that rejection, Iannelli himself left Chicago in 1924 to tour Europe with his good friend Barry Byrne. In 1925 back in Chicago, Iannelli continued his work on various industrial design projects with Sunbeam, Eversharp, Parker, and others. He also designed the Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge. His philosophy of total design was shown in the Pickwick as he helped to design many little things in order to achieve the final product. The Iannelli studio worked as a team to complete this large-scale job, which included the fountain, the murals on

the fire curtain and the ceiling (a huge task), organ and ventilating grille, and the plaster ornamentation all over the building including on the sides of the marquee. Iannelli's design philosophy, which relates directly to his encounter of both European and Native American art, shows in the Pickwick his tendency to honor indigenous American art over the art of his birthplace. The Pickwick continues in all its glory today. It was made a national hiscoric landmark in 1975 and is known around the world as the theater in the opening sequence of Ebert and Roeper's At The Movies television program.

In 1928, Iannelli was invited back to the Art Institute as head of the Department of Design, which was this time sponsored by the Association of Arts and Industries (a group created to help fund programs co teach new artists industrial design). Unfortunately in 1930, Iannelli resigned from the program because of

the lack of support from the Art Institute. It was not until 1937 with the "New Bauhaus" directed by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy that Iannelli's dreams in 1923 came into fruition regretfully without Iannelli.

During 1933-34, Chicago was preparing for the Century of Progress Exhibition. Iannelli designed the five sculptured reliefs for the Radio Entrance to the Social Sciences Building, the gigantic fair exhibit "Coaster Boy" for the legendary Chicago wagon company Radio Flyer, and the Havoline thermometer exhibit, which was on record as the world's largest thermometer for

many years. He also designed the Goodyear landing field and lounge

for the Goodyear blimp, as well as the now very recognizable Sunbeam Coffeemaster made by Chicago Flexible Shaft Company for the World of Tomorrow exhibit.

Throughout the forties, Iannelli concentrated chiefly on industrial design for many companies, including Oster Manufacturing Company. He also made one last collaboration with Barry Byrne on the Church of St.

Francis Xavier in Kansas City Missouri. In 1950, Iannelli received the Industrial Designer's Institute Award for an Oster Hairdryer. In 1954, he designed the Rock of Gibraltar relief for the Prudential Building in Chicago. His final work, completed in 1956, was a sculpture for the Public Welfare Building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Alfonso Iannelli died on March 23, 1965 at the age of seventy-seven. Margaret passed away a little over two years later.

Alfonso Iannelli Timeline

• 1888 Born, Andretta, Italy.

• 1889 Iannelli family moved to Newark, New Jersey

• 1901 Apprenticed as Jeweler, attended Newark Technical School at night

• 1906 Won scholarship to Art Students League

• 1907 Worked for Gutzon Borglum and opened studio for a short time

• 1910 Moved to Los Angeles. Designed theatre posters for Orpheum Vaudeville. Started the School of American Art

• 1910-1914 Became collaborator and friend to John Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright, Irving J. Gill and Barry Byrne.

• 1914 Called to Chicago to collaborate with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Midway Gardens.

Began lifelong collaboration with Barry Byrne on

J.B. Franke House in Fort Wayne, Indiana

• 1915 Moved permanently to Chicago. Married Margaret Sawyer and opened Iannelli Studios in Park Ridge, Illinois

• 1916- Early 1920s Continued collaboration with Barry Byrne on many private homes and churches. Birth of son Alfonso Jr. and daughter Iraene.

• 1921 First one-man show at the Art Institute of Chicago

• 1922 Completed Church of St. Thomas the Apostle

• 1923 Instructor of Design, Art Institute of Chicago

• 1924 Tour of Europe with Barry Byrne

• 1925 Designed Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois. One-man show at the Art Institute

• 1926 Church of Christ the King completed in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Barry Byrne

• 1925-1930s Industrial Design work done for a variety of companies

• 1927 Interior Design of Catlow Theater in Barrington, Illinois

• 1928 Honorary M.F.A., Art Institute of Chicago

• 1928-30 Head of Design Department and Instructor of Design, Art Institute of Chicago

• 1933-34 Design of Havoline Thermometer Tower and Radio Entrance to the Social Sciences Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago.

• 1940 Last Prairie Style work done on "Fountain of Pioneers" in Kalamazoo, Michigan

• 1950 Won Industrial Designer's Institute Award for Oster Hairdryer

• 1954 Designed Rock of Gibraltar Relief for Prudential Building in Chicago

• 1965 Died in Park Ridge, March 23. Unmarked grave, Town of Main Cemetery

lannelli's designs are found in many places

Conclusion

From his exploration of America, his encounter with American art and artists, to his exchange of philosophy with his collaborators, Alfonso Iannelli was a visionary. Although mostly known in architectural and sculptural circles, the average American has probably encountered a work produced by Iannelli unknowingly. His numerous churches, schools, and movie theaters around the country are some of the best examples of prairie, art deco, and art noveau architecture in the world. In addition, his industrial designs, pop culture classics such as the Sunbeam Coffeemaster, exemplify Iannelli's belief that sculpture should have a purpose as well as a visual identity. In Iannelli's search for American art and in his dismissal of the typical European favoritism, Iannelli 's philosophy mirrored the late-nineteenth century movement in architecture personified by Louis Sullivan and continued by Frank Lloyd Wright. Total design, a revolutionary concept not common in turn of the century architecture, was critical to Iannelli. His great spirit in sharing ideas helped him form a better-rounded style-not to mention his incredible heart which strove for truth, beauty, and love in all aspects of life and form.

KNOW YOURSELF-KNOW YOUR PAST: THE SOCIETY HONORS YOUNG HISTORIANS

It has been a long time, but in 2004 the Hyde Park Historical Society got back co the basics-back to the kids and back to the schools.

Working with grants from anonymous donors, the education committee-Board members Priya Shimpi and Jay Mulberry---organized an impressive effort co involve young people in the study of the past of the Hyde Park Community. Lace in 2003, they consulted mavens from the long established Metro History Pair about how to do such a thing. They put together rules and procedures for first Hyde Park Historical Society Neighborhood History Contest. It was open co students in grades 6-12 in schools within the historic Hyde Park Township, or to anyone at all who entered the Chicago Metro History Fair with a project related co Hyde Park.

Notification of the contest was faxed or emailed co scores of South Side Schools, and a website

(http:/ /hydeparkhiscory.org/contesc) was created so the

information would be universally accessible.

In February, Priya Shimpi visited as many schools as would give her time and talked with students, teachers and principals about the Contest. Entries

were delivered to the Society late in May and all were evaluated by three different judges. On June 6 a reception was held for all the entrants, their teachers and parents and awards totaling $300 were distributed among 5 winners. $100 had been given earlier through the Metro History Fair ro the best entry in that citywide competition that dealt with a Hyde Park topic.

All participants received a certificate and a copy of

"The Worlds Fair Game", contributed by i cs author (and our member) Peter Nepstad.

First prize ribbons and a cash award of $100 were given in the categories of Middle School and High School, and Second prize ribbons and a cash award of

$50 were given in the same categories.

A $100 prize was previously awarded co the outstanding entry in the Metro History Fair relating to the history of the area of the Hyde Park Township. This went to Grace Green of St. Ignatius College Prep for her superb study of Alfonso Iannelli.

A special award was given to Juan Hernandez of Juarez High School for his project "America's First Serial Killer" since, for technical reasons, his excellent project was ineligible for competition. His prize was a copy of the book "The Devil and the White City" especially dedicated co him by its author, Erik Larson, who contributed the award.

\ 11 Ill rtl t I > 0 ti I

Participants and Prize Winners:

Hyde Park Historical Society Metro History Fair Prize

Grace Green

Project: Alfonso Iannelli

St. Ignatius College Prep. High School

1st Place High School

Theresa Bailey

Project: Valois: See Your Food

South Shore School of Entrepreneurship Teacher: Seth Pacner

2nd Place High School

Gary Densmore

Project: Lakefront Homes

South Shore School of Entrepreneurship Teacher: Seth Patner

Special Recognition High School

Juan Hernandez

Project: America's First Serial Killer Juarez High School

Teacher: Al Moy

J st Place Middle School

Ciobhan Judith Dunn

Project: The Changing of Bronzeville, 1940-1960 North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School

Teacher: Darrell Johnson

2nd Place Middle School

Jordae Evans, Monique Greyer, Earnest Hale, Shanika Harris

Project: Oak Woods Cemetery Paul Revere Elementary School Teacher: Kim Campbell

Carla Askew

Project: Bronzeville Landmarks

North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School Teacher: Darrell Johnson

Xavier Hawthorne

Project: Oak Woods Cemetery Paul Revere Elementary School Teacher: Jon Lowenstein

Elisa Kimble

Project: Harold Washington Paul Revere Elementary School Teacher: Jon Lowenstein

Jacqueline Lewis

Project: What Made The Palm Tavern North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School Teacher: Darrell Johnson

Portia King

Project: Bronzeville Night Clubs l 920s- l 940s North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School Teacher: Darrell Johnson

Dominique Potts

Project: How Bronzeville Has Changed North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School Teacher: Darrell Johnson

Students of Room 303

Project: General Frank C. Brown, Jr. Powell Academy

Teacher: Joseph Rboiney

Haoxiang Xu Project: Hyde Park Kenwood Academy Teacher: Ivan Sarudi

Paul Revere Elementary School students and teachers

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By Bruce Thomas

Bruce Thomas is a Hyde Park writer and consultant.

Once upon a time, in an era far away, four men created a bar. Like many of the best things in the world, it was evanescent. It lasted 16 years. Or, possibly, 17. And it may have been 5 men who created it, or three; in the case of this bar, the fact-fiction continuum is a bit of a maze. The date of its demise- September 30, 1980-- is documented, however, and the death was an omen: a scant few weeks later, Ronald Reagan was elected president and life's been downhill ever since.

It was known as the Eagle. The Eagle lived--and lived well-at 5311 S. Blackstone. It was not just a bar. It was also a restaurant. And it was not just a bar restaurant. In fact the Eagle testifies to the fickleness and feebleness of labels and categories. It was a working man's saloon, a gentleman's club, an English pub, a little piece of home away from home, a site for

academic seminars and church governance meetings, a cafe, an exuberantly abundant source of stories, a perpetual wake for W. C. Fields, a post-racquetball rendezvous, a center for recycled urban artifacts whose provenance did not bear too much looking into, a financial aid system for graduate education at the University (particularly, it seems, for the Committee on Social Thought, whose apprentices tended to have graduate careers of near-triple-digit duration).

le was an on-going, broadly participatory event in the annals of social democracy and when it died, people mourned.

le started in 1962 or 1963, when several men began talking about creating a bar. Jeff Metcalf was the Dean of the University of Chicago Business School. Peter Katos was a bartender. Bob Stack was a businessman. Katos and Metcalf had served together as Marines in the Pacific theatre of World War II. Metcalf and Stack had met at the business school, which Stack had attended after floating around in the world for 12

years as a merchant seaman. Jerry Sullivan, the ►49

-<O fourth partner, worked for the city and apparently played a decisive role in obtaining the Eagle's liquor license.

Metcalf, Katos and Stack probably had the defining and durable vision for the Eagle. It was well that they had a strong vision because they did not have a business plan and its absence, given the business school connections of two out of the three men, embedded a scent of irony in the walls of the Eagle that time never erased. They wanted a quiet place to drink and talk that had an aura of class and an ethos of classlessness. They wanted a local spot with a whiff of the world beyond the borders of Hyde Park-- and so the drinks list featured Bass Ale and Pimm's Cup.

What the founding fathers (who incorporated themselves as the Arak Refining Company--a flight of whimsy attributed to the unsinkable Bob Stack) wanted was, to a remarkable degree, what they got.

But the vision proved remarkably open-ended and generous. Bill Bauer, a friend of Peter Katos and versed in matters of set design, helped ro decorate the

Eagle and to install the stained glass. The stained glass had a story. Bob Powell, a looming presence in Eagle history, worked for the city and, in the Chicago way, also worked the city. He was wont, in the early days, to work it to the benefit of the Eagle. Involved in the urban renewal program, Powell knew what structures were to be razed and appreciated that these structures often contained items of furniture and decor that merited preservation. The stained glass quickly became an emblem of the Eagle ambience.

Powell both preserved artifacts and served drinks; he often tended bar at the Eagle, invariably dressed in a Dior suit or the like. Powell as bartender embodied another singular facet of the Eagle 's multi-faceted identity: traditional labor-management distinctions did not consistently apply there. Powell was not a formal employee of the Eagle though he may well

have shared some of its liquid assets.

Sometime in the mid-sixties, three of the founding fathers sold out their interest to the fourth, Peter Katos, who then ran the Eagle until his death in 1971. Thereafter, his widow, Casey, took over the Eagle until its closure in 1980. In its location at 5311 S. Blackstone, the Eagle came in time ro occupy three rooms. The southernmost was the bar. The main dining room was adjacent and the third room, northernmost and the last acquired, fulfilled multiple functions--it served as an overflow dining room, provided a grand piano and afforded space to an assortment of scuff stacked against the west wall. The piano was rarely played; it mostly provided a roof for

empty beer kegs. The infrequency of the piano's employment was fully in keeping with the ambience of the Eagle which, having no television, juke box or sound system, was authoritatively hospitable to human conversation.

The three rooms together didn't add up to a lot of space. The Eagle was small. Its size, we now realize, was proportionate to its character. In a space of greater dimensions, the idiosyncratic particularities (the last four digits of the Eagle phone number were 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed, and the phone itself was an old tan rotary apparatus with no dial, so it could only take incoming calls) and the human-scale charms of the Eagle would have been dissipated. The size controlled the numbers of people who attended Eagle services and so it was easy for the servers to come to know by face, name and, in time, history those whom they served. Those who served, the bartenders and the waitresses, became for many the heart of the Eagle. And it was axiomatic that you

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could not ever assume that you were either brighter or better educated than an Eagle waitress or bartender.

The Eagle's menu was, like the Eagle itself, small. It

was the quality that trumped. The Eagle had good simple food. Regulars tended to have favorites, like the steak sandwich, fish and chips or the Eagle Sandwich that assembled between two sheets of black bread a harmonious offering of real turkey, roast beef, Swiss and American cheese.

The food was one important ingredient in the Eagle's specialness. It meant that while the Eagle was a superior saloon, it was also a good place to take your kids for dinner. When his two daughters were teen and preteen, Bob Ashenhurst took chem one night to the Eagle for dinner. The waitress first took their

drink orders. Ashenhurst pere ordered a beer, the older daughter a coke. The younger daughter followed, scarcely skipping a beat, with her order of a Pimm's Cup. The wonderful, special thing about the Eagle, Ashenhurst says, was that the waitress brought it to her.

Eagle apocrypha abounds. In its abundance and variety are further lineaments of the Eagle's special

character. One oft-told story, rendered in a number of versions, has Peter Katos at the bar one evening when a man sitting at the bar began making crude overtures to the woman sitting next to him. Katos brought the man a drink, set in front of him and said: "This drink is on the house. I want to you to finish it, and then leave and never come back." Legend or lore, the story comports with people's memories of the Eagle as a safe place. It was not just a site where single women could comfortably go. It was a scene of surcease from gender, racial, class, work site and even intra-familial frictions. Art Geffen, a retired Minnesota English professor who did his graduate work at the University of Chicago, says of the Eagle that "it achieved the compatibility of incompatible elements. Very different people got on there--you never saw the bartender having to come out from behind the bar."

One of the legendary waitresses at the Eagle, Claudia Traudt, captures in a few words the special appeal of a place that composed a piece of the soul of Hyde Park for a decade and a half: "If the Eagle had

continued, I would have kept a shift there for life." W

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GEORGE WELLS BEADLE'S FARM ON THE MIDWAY

by Frances Vandervoort

Frances Vandervoort is a HPHS Board Member and former biology teacher at the Faulkner School and Kenwood Academy. She is currently doing research on the geological history of Hyde Park.

"That's smut," said the farmer. He poked the purplish tumescence on the corn ear with a soil stained finger.

"That isn't blight?" asked the city slicker.

"Nope," he said. "Blight's in the leaves, not the ear." "Oh,"said the city slicker, deflated.

I was the city slicker. The farmer was George Wells Beadle, Nobel laureate and recently retired president of the University of Chicago. My husband Peter and I had recently purchased a house on Ellis Avenue, and we often passed by Mr. Beadle's corn patches when walking to campus. We shared community delight that not only had the Beadles decided to remain in Hyde Park after Mr. Beadle's retirement, but that this wonderful scientist would be conducting research just down our street!

Beadle's research on corn was special. Peter and I used to speculate about how self-respecting farmers from downstate Illinois or Iowa might react to the strange specimens they saw growing on Ellis Avenue. The plants tended to be short, with separate tassels on each of several stalks. Sometimes every tassel was painstakingly covered with a tightly sealed plastic bag. No ordinary corn here!

Working in his corn patches in the early morning hours, Mr. Beadle buttonholed passersby, eager to tell them about his most recent investigations. His enthusiasm for his work was infectious; he soon became a popular speaker at community and university groups. I invited him to talk to my high school biology students at Faulkner School, in nearby South Shore. I'd taught them a bit about his Nobel Prize-winning genetics research, and they were anxious to meet him in person. He arrived at the school, dapper in tweed sport jacket, bearing a large carton of potted corn plants, and providing samples of tiny red corn ears for all. Describing his work as "amazingly corny," he soon had their rapt attention.

A new book, George Beadle: An Uncommon Farmer, by Paul Berg and Maxine Singer (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003), details the life of this

George Wells Beadle

extraordinary scientist, administrator, and yes, farmer. Beadle was born and raised on a 40-acre farm near Wahoo, Nebraska. After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1926, he enrolled at Cornell University, ostensibly to study the ecology of New York state pasture grasses. He soon found that agricultural ecology was not for him. For Beadle, moving to the Ivy League meant big league genetics with such famed scientists as Rollin Emerson and Barbara McClintock.

After Beadle received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1930 he moved to Cal Tech, then spent one year at Harvard, which he declared "much too formal for a Wahoo farm boy." He returned to California, this time to Stanford, where his work increasingly focused on the nature of genes and gene action. At Stanford, groundbreaking research by Beadle and colleague Edward Tatum on gene action in the red bread mold, Neurospora crassa, led to their Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1958.

In late 1960, Beadle was offered the chancellorship of the University of Chicago. He could not refuse the

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challenge to lead an historically great university in a drab, run-down neighborhood on Chicago's south side. Opting to be called President Beadle, and he and wife Muriel moved to Chicago in 1961.

Beadle always found an excuse to grow corn, and soon green shoots began emerging from a small plot near the president's house. He also promoted campus beautification -- the campus soon abounded with flowers. He established "Beadle fences"-- barriers to keep "horti-culturally deprived"srudents from trampling freshly planted lawns. He insisted that neglected buildings and other structures be tidied up, including an old rusted gate at Stagg Field. Botany Pond, for many years a mud hole, soon had an attractive concrete border.

Beadle retired in 1968 at the then-mandatory age of 65, and soon was fretting about what "a broken-down college administrator "could do then. Sensing his frustration, the university board of trustees presented him with a greenhouse, which soon was put together behind the house he and his wife had bought on Dorchester Avenue. He now could go back to work on his long-dormant pet project, determining the genetic origins of corn.

For years he had held that domestic corn, Zea mays, had been selectively bred from an ancestral wild grain, teosinte, by ancient peoples living in Central America. Beadle learned as much as he could about this ancient species, grinding its kernels to make a palatable porridge, and heating it to produce tiny white flakes of popcorn! The odd crops he grew in Hyde Park were hybrids of corn and teosinte. DNA studies completed after Beadle's death confirmed his ideas about corn ancestry.

Beadle was often seen on campus as well as in his corn patches. Manfred Ruddat, plant biologist, once invited him to address his plant survey class about, appropriately, corn. Only too happy to oblige, Beadle arrived with wife Muriel, who stood in the doorway, graciously greeting every student. Ruddat is confident Beadle would have been "100 percent in favor

of' genetically modified agricultural crops. Beadle's professional conservatism would have assured that such modification would be very carefully controlled.

Countless individuals interacted with George Beadle during his Chicago years, and a special few became part of his gardening inner circle. Around the president's house, Beadle grew hybrid day lilies developed by U. of C. botanist Paul Voth. When Beadle retired he offered some of these lilies to Janet and Donald Rowley. Once, when he dropped by their house to see how the lilies were doing, they consulted

him about their plan to build a greenhouse on their second floor balcony. "But Janet,"he said. "How will you get the manure up to the second floor?"

George Beadle thrived on early morning gardening. Early one rainy Sunday morning, hoping to work on his corn plots, he met greenhouse manager Joe Galinis at the Barnes Laboratory on the northwest corner of 57th Street and Ingleside Avenue. Somehow, he and Galinis managed to lock themselves out of the building. Undaunted, they decided to scale the fence. Halfway up, they were spotted by a campus policeman, who demanded that they identify themselves. The former president of the University of Chicago gave the officer his name, which rang no bell at all with the Sunday morning patrolman. Finally the matter was straightened out, and the officer departed with a smart salute.

The corn patches were part of Hyde Park for several years. Then, for health reasons the Beadles moved to an apartment on 56th Street, and Beadle, in his farm gear-old shirt, heavy shoes, often a stocking cap, began caking the CTA bus to his beloved plots. His mind began to fail in the late 1970's. Diagnosed with senile-onset Alzheimer's disease in 1983, he died in California in 1988, his wife in 1994. Their ashes rest in urns in Rockefeller Chapel.

Today, the corn patch on the east side of Ellis Avenue lies beneath the Court Theater. The plot on the west side is beneath the basketball court of the Ratner Athletics Center. George Wells Beadle may not have been the only president of the University of Chicago to have been a full-time scientist -- Max Mason, who served 3 years in the l 920's, was a mathematical physicist. He was, however, the only president who was also a farmer. There is no doubt chat he succeeded in all three endeavors.

Thanks are due the following people who offered ideas and suggestions for this article: Roger Hildebrand, Marta Nicholas, Janet Rowley, Manfred Ruddat, Janice Spofford, and Mary Ruth Yoe.

This issue of Hyde Park History contains three articles written by our members as part of our sharing program with the Hyde Park Herald. They are reprinted here in the newsletter in order to give them a more permanent home.

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THE VIKING OF JACKSON PARK

By Peter Nepstad

Peter Nepstad has studied the 189 3 World's Fair for the past four years to develop a CD-ROM adventure game called "1893: A World's Fair Mystery"which can be ordered on line at http://illumintedlantern.com/1893.

About an hour's drive west of Chicago, in a private park, sits a 110-year-old wooden ship that once made headlines around the world. The flimsy tarp that protected it from the elements has been blown aside by strong winds, and rain now freely pounds against the exposed wood. It is only a matter of time until the ship is damaged beyond repair. But in its current location, few people will even note its disappearance; many believe it is gone already.

It wasn't always this way.

The story of the ship is a long one that goes back to 1880, to Gokstad, Norway, and the discovery of a Viking war vessel unearthed from a burial mound.

The Gokstad, as it was called, was built around 890 and was in remarkable shape. It provided the first tangible evidence that the Vikings had built ships capable of traveling to the New World.

But the proof would have to wait for a Norwegian named Magnus Andersen who decided that a replica of a Viking ship should be sailed across the Atlantic, as a counterpoint to the World Exhibition that would be held in America in 1893 to honor Columbus. He later recalled, "As I thought this over more closely, I found the idea more and more attractive. That Lief Erikson had been in America before Columbus had been

clearly proved but was not commonly known either in America or elsewhere, not even Norway ..."

The replica of the Gokstad was funded by popular subscription and completed in time for the Exposition. It was decorated with a silk banner embroidered with ravens. The ship itself was christened "The Raven," but American popular press quickly named it, "The Viking." Magnus Andersen was the Captain.

The Viking sailed from Bergen, Norway and reached Newfoundland four weeks later. The crew, uncercai n how the ship would handle on the open seas, found it had exceeded all expectations. "We noted with admiration the ship's graceful movements," Andersen later wrote.

From Newfoundland, Viking headed south to New

York, then sailed into the Great Lakes. Carter Harrison, Chicago's four-term mayor, boarded and took command for the last leg of the voyage, arriving at Jackson Park on Wednesday, July 12, 1893 to much fanfare. Magnus Andersen had turned his dreams into reality.

The Viking moored at Jackson Park for the remainder of the fair. Afterwards, the Captain piloted it through the ILM canal to the Mississippi River, all the way to New Orleans - the only seafaring vessel to ever to do so.

The ship was brought back to Chicago and stored in the Field Columbian Museum until 1919, when it was restored and placed in Lincoln Park. In 1933, Magnus Andersen repeated his historic voyage in a modern freighter to appear at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition.

The ship sat in Lincoln Park right up until the 1970s. Covered by a roof and enclosed by a chain-link fence, it sat outside in the blistering heat of summer and the freezing cold of winter until the wood seems more akin to steel than anything else. Time had taken its toll on the Viking.

The Chicago Park District, without the funds to do a proper restoration, sold the ship for $1 to the American Scandinavian Council, which promised to raise the necessary funds; estimated at $12 million dollars, to restore the historic vessel.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. But the funds were never successfully raised, and no preservation or restoration has been done. Unfortunately, the ship was also moved out of Lincoln Park, and has been out of

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the public eye for nearly thirty years. Now it sits in Good Templar Park, a private park located in Geneva, IL, and closed to the public for much of the year. And the careful work of keeping it dry for the past fifty or so years is being undone by a temporary shelter that no longer keeps off the rain.

It seems unbelievable that the historic vessel has ended up in this condition. But the situation is not entirely without hope. Ownership of the ship may have reverted to the Chicago Park District. And all parties are now seeking a new, permanent location. Cook County Commissioner Carl Hansen, a long time advocate of the project, describes all parties involved as committed to saving the ship and giving it a new home where everyone can enjoy this part of their cultural heritage. "We are looking for a permanent location for the ship, before we try again to preserve it," Hansen said. "We've all learned the hard way how hard it is to raise funds for something when no one knows what will happen to it once it is finished."

Nothing has been decided yet, and discussions for a new home for the Viking are still underway. Among the possibilities: the Museum of Science and Industry, housed in the last remaining World's Fair building still located in Jackson Park. Perhaps someday soon, the

Viking will once again set sail, and return to the place that has always been its only true destination. W

LOOKING BACK ...WAY BACK ...

From the Hyde Park Herald, March 23, 1888:

These are some of our reasons why we were and still are opposed to annexation (annexation of Hyde Park to the City of Chicago):

Because the taxes on a lot on the city side of Thirty-ninth street are $5.75 higher than they are on a lot exactly the same value on the Hyde Park side of the street.

Because $1 handed to a police officer will get a building permit on any kind of a house in Hyde Park, while in Chicago you must go in person and pay from

$2.50 to $15 for a permit.

Because city water is poluted by sewerage and water closets, while in Hyde Park it is as clean and pure as lake water can possibly be.

Because it puts our police force under the control of Aldermen, many of whom are elected by the bummer element of the city.

Because the city of Chicago never has and never can sustain prohibition districts.

Because public improvements never has nor ever can be secured as quickly in the city as they can be in Hyde Park.

Because two or even four aldermen are not enough to represent the large territory comprising what is known as the Twenty-fifth ward.

Because the city is in debt $19,000,000, a part of which debt we should have to pay without having a dollar's benefit.

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HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY ANNUAL MEETING, 2005

celebratory mood prevailed as nearly 200 guests mixed and mingled at the annual dinner meeting

of the Hyde Park Historical Society, held February 5, 2005, at the Quadrangle Club. Attendees were

greeted by the sweet strains of music by Gershwin and Schubert played by pianist Elaine Smith. After a meal of chicken breast with mornay sauce, green beans, and praline sundae for dessert, host Bert Benade introduced the Society's president, Carol Bradford, who reported on the current status of the organization.

Presentation of the Cornell Awards followed, the first going to Bruce Sagan, owner and publisher of The Hyde Park Herald. In the spirit of the event, Mr. Sagan generously donated a check for $2500 to the Society. An award was given to the Greenwood Row House Association, represented by Joe Marlin. Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Miguel D'Escoto, represented by Chris Wuellner, and sculptor Paul Petreanu, represented by his son, were cited for

their work in the restoration of the Animal Bridge on South Shore Drive. The last Cornell award went to the Montgomery Place Book Committee for their book, In It Together.

A high point of the evening was the presentation by Jack Spicer of the first Leon and Marian Despres Preservation Award. This award, appropriately given to Mr. and Mr. Despres, honored their work on behalf of the city's architectural heritage, including the preservation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, Glessner House in the Prairie Avenue Historic District, and ocher efforts leading to the establishment of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. After accepting the award and giving due praise to Mrs. Despres, Mr. Despres entertained the audience by reading excerpts from his forthcoming book, an autobiographical account of his life and experiences as Fifth Ward alderman.

A fine time was had by all. Cilill

The Greenwood Row House District, Part 1

By Joe Marlin

Note: Since this account was written by Mr. Marlin, the Greenwood Row Hotm District was designated a Chicago Landmark by Ordinance of the Chicago City Council on December 8, 2004.

Joe Marlin, who lives at 5234 South Greenwood Avenue, accepted the Cornell Award on behalf of the Greenwood Row House District of Hyde Park at the Hyde Park Historical Society annual meeting in February. His brief acceptance speech was a gracious, often amusing commentary about life on this block. He gave the Society an extended, perceptive, and often humorous report, which has been edited for this newsletter.

Our Block: A Brief History

This is a brief history of the 5200 block of Greenwood Avenue (West side, of course) containing for the edification of its readers some brief notes on Hyde Park's past, with appropriate comments on the architectural significance of our homes, togetber with various and sundry information of the utmost interest to the diligent student of history.

It has been prepared by Joseph R. Marlin, unofficial block historian, who begs your indulgence for

performing a task for which he has no credentials whatsoever, and who wrote a few sentences with

tongue-in-cheek!

History of Hyde Park

Hyde Park Township was incorporated in 1861 from a broader swath of land to the south and west, but it was still of significant size,

Houses of Greenwood Row, 1954

is now 138th Street, and from State Street to the lake. North Hyde Park Township consisted of three areas: Kenwood, Hyde Park Center (51st to 55th Streets), and South Park (55th to 59th Street).

In 1889, the year Hyde Park was annexed into Chicago, the area west of Kimbark was considered vacant swamp land, but with the annexation the ground, never quite hallowed, on which we live, became part of Chicago. I have heard, although this is

not confirmed, Aloysius J. Daley, the great grandfather of the mayor gave several influential

persons season's tickets to nearby Washington Park race crack (some considered it the finest in the world) to vote the right way. Please do not repeat this.

By the turn of the century, the swamp land west of Woodlawn Avenue began to be developed. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright's Heller House at 5132

S. Woodlawn was built, and in 1904, 5235 and 5317

S. University were put up. Our (Greenwood) houses were completed in 1903, but presumably started the prev10us year.

Before discussing our block's development, who was involved and how our houses relate to our Hyde Park Kenwood Historic District, we need to understand how Greenwood Avenue became Greenwood Avenue,

don't we? Jean Block (in Hyde Park Houses) states that Greenwood was the name of the home of Hamilton Bogue, a real estate broker of the day. However, a card in the street card file of the Chicago Historic Society indicates that Greenwood was named in honor of William M. Greenwood, a lawyer and real estate promoter. There you have it, clear as swamp water. At lease real estate seemed to be a common thread. Now lee us proceed to consider one Samuel Eberly Gross, our developer and his associates, who wanted to make

5226 S. Greenwood, showing.original grassy slope in front

extending from

35ch Street to what

money and help people move to the more countrified areas in the west part of the old Hyde Park Center.

Our Block: Its Development, Architecture, and History

Just to get you off on the right track, our block is within the Hyde Park-Kenwood Historic District, which is included in the National Register of Historic Places, Department of the Interior. This is not the same as being listed as a Landmark District (as Kenwood is, and as our block is currently being considered for). The plaque attached to (the house at) 5244 does not count (as a landmark building) ... as it was placed there not by the action of the City Council but rather by Dr.

is sufficiently offended by this atrocity can contribute substantial sums to the 5234 Betterment Fund.

Sometime back I did get a ballpark estimate for an appropriate restoration. The next thing I knew I was being picked up off the floor!)

So there you have it, the authoritative yet not complete, the skimpy yet somewhat detailed history of our block. I alone am responsible for any errors but I take no responsibility for any attempts at levity. And remember whatever else you do, do not tell the mayor

about the annexation move, as he's rather

Mittendorf who lived there a few years - : N_G---= A=-:N:.:s-R;;EW A;R D;:-.i

ago with his family. The plaque refers T?:;1E woRKI

to our block as the "first professors' row" although some think it was originally referred to as "doctors' row."

Samuel Eberly Gross was the developer of our block. He was not a modest man. In one of his ads he billed himself as "the world's greatest real estate dealer." The southwestern suburb of Brookfield (yes, where the zoo is) was originally called Grossdale ... He was a

sensitive to certain matters. Oh yes, there is one concluding matter. ..

You remember the famous quote, "Ask not what your block can do for you, ask what you can do for your block." Actually on our block we ask both questions. Our block club, which over the years has met periodically, has done a number of things

through collective and collaborative

g efforts. In the summer of 2003 Malba

Allen with the help of three other residents, and through her energetic

brash big shot who developed thousands of homes, perhaps as many as 10,000, and sold even more lots. Typical of his time, and I guess ours, he over-expanded near the end of his life and went bankrupt.

When he was 65 he divorced his wife, married a seventeen-year-old, and apparently rejuvenated, amassed another sizeable fortune before he died in 1913.

Gross is not well-remembered because he was primarily a developer

;,! efforts and skills at getting things done,

helped the block win a grant co improve our block's lighting,

g including installing period lighting

• • lower on the posts. The block received

B'6"' £ $7500.00 from The Southeast

Chicago Commission's

T111. 11·01u.n 58<: 1£. GR os administration of the University

.... '""0• ... .:.:. ..... REAL ESTATED of Chicago's Neighborhood

Enhancement Grant Program. This year I suspect we will try for

of working-class housing, but he and his architect on some projects, John

C. Brampton, did manage to create one landmark district, Alta Vista Terrace (the 3800 block of North Alta Vista Terrace). And when our block is declared a landmark district they will have two to their credit!

In 1987 the Commission (on City Landmarks) rated the homes in our

block. This was part of a survey done

ili

Cl)

u0.:.

lff

-= -- ---====------

another grant.

Many of our block residents attended the May, 2003 meeting hosted by our Alderman, Toni Preckwinkle co explore the City's interest in our block being declared a Landmark District.

Alderman Preckwinkle has always been interested in our concerns (and) has been quite supportive in helping us maintain our unique

over several years of every structure in Chicago ... Your bumble servant must confess that (the house at 5234 Greenwood Avenue) is his! However please be aware that the massacre of the front scoop was perpetrated prior to 1935! It appears that someone wanted co create a coal bin! It has been reported, and this may be apocryphal that in the past several residents developed scoliosis of the neck from trying co avert their gaze when walking by the castellated stoop. (Anyone who

block ... More recently we have dealt with many concerns regarding the conversion of the Osteopathic Hospital buildings to condos just to our west, as well as the construction of 28 row houses. And thanks co Judy Allen, those of us who are chronic accumulators have annual garage sales. And how about our ice cream socials?

So our block's future is what we make of it ourselves. I hope it's a lot! W

S1,rlng 2005

The Mayor

and Hyde Park

By Sue Purrington

The lase time I spoke to Harold Washington was about two weeks before he died. I was the director of Chicago NOW at the time and we had auctioned "Tea and Crumpets" with the Mayor at one of our

fund raisers (the idea of tea and crumpets, if you recall, came about when Walter Jacobsen publicly hinted that he wanted to be invited to the Mayor's apartment for tea and crumpets). Well, the Mayor's staff was unable to locate crumpets, so the winners and myself had tea and scones with the Mayor.

After the others had left, Harold and I talked for a little while, and I asked him how he was doing and how he liked being Mayor. He said, "I love this job

more than anything I have ever done! This was all I ever wanted to be, although I didn't know it at the time." He loved the people, the pomp and circumstance, the working of government and public policy. He loved being Mayor, he loved Chicago.

And he loved

preserve that diversity. People from other parts of the city complained that there were too many too

many Jews, too many Blacks, too many Hyde Parkers in his administration. Few people remarked that there had not been many Jews, Blacks or Hyde Parkers in city government previously. He was proud of the neighborhood chat produced all that talent that not only put him in office but sustained him, and of course, kept after him when we felt he did wrong.

Before he became Mayor, Harold walked around more by himself. Unfortunately that was one of the few things he missed when he went from Congress to the city, he began co lose his privacy. He lunched at the Unique (I always thought it was his favorite place) where he held court regularly, always taking time co launch into an intense discussion with his constituents. And we in turn never really felt we were his constituents, we were his friends; we were his partners going down that path with him to make the city become a better place for everyone. He ace at Valois, he had takeout from the Far East Kitchen, and sometimes had breakfast at Nicky's. And his regular grocery score was the Co-op Express on 53rd, where he did all of bis lace night emergency shopping for toilet paper, toothpaste, and snacks. That was the place co be just before they closed for the evening: I shopped

many nights with Ab.Mikva, Bob Mann, Al Raby, Lu Palmer and ochers. The Express was a hidden hoc bed of political discussion. One night at the Express, when Harold was just making up his mind co announce his run for Mayor, he asked me if I wanted co quit my job and run away co the circus with him (join the mayoral campaign). I didn't, he did and the rest is history.

Again, before be became Mayor, I would see him at the easternmost part of the Point, just at the place where there is an endless line of water and sky. He was seemingly staring out at the water, but even then the political wheels were turning about the next

Mayor Washington at the Monk Parakeet Nest in Hyde Park

Hyde Park. It is difficult to write

adventure, the next challenge. After he became Mayor, I never saw him there again except for special events,

about Harold in a non-political way because that was the essence of the man. But wrapped up in that were the strong ties to the neighborhood he adopted. While the south side molded him, Hyde Park was the place in many ways that he had been waiting for all his life.

He loved the neighborhood because while we created him with the respect he deserved, we were also brash, strong, articulate and relentless in our pursuit of whatever we thought (no, knew) was right. He relished the encounters he had on 53rd Street or 55th Street or at the University of Chicago and he thrived on the intellectual challenges brought to him

everyday. He loved the diversity and the deeply respected the people who spent their lives working to

something I regretted and I am sure he did. One morning I was stopped in my walk co the then shuttered 63rd Street Beach house by a car in which Harold was sitting .....and we walked around that old building as he cold me its history. He would love what it is now. Occasionally he was able co make it on March 13 co honor Clarence Darrow and wait for his spirit to arise from the lagoon. He certainly was never an outdoorsman, but he appreciated the environment and understood the need to protect it.

Even the birds. He had a love/hate relationship with those parrots. He understood how valuable his location across the street from chem protected them and helped them thrive, but there were those days, at

S1,rlng 2005

6:30 a.m. when they flew by his windows on their morning flights with their raucous voices when he felt like opening his window and screaming at them to go away. But his was proud of them in his own way and told me once they fit well in Hyde Park because of their loudness and their tenacity.

And next to the people, he loved the bookstores. Harold Washington, despite his tight schedule, was a voracious reader all his life. He spent his extra hours in Powell's, O'Gara's, 57th Street, and Seminary, and read and read. I saw him often in that wonderful bookstore on Kimbark, Reid Michener's, that seemed to stay open forever, and where he spent late night hours reading everything. I think his favorites were biographies and autobiographies, however, and mostly about people who effected change, both 'in the system and from the outside. I would come home some nights and there would be a book dropped off to my landlord for me about someone he thought I should know more about. There was never a note with the book but I knew it was from him and chat this was my homework.

Harold and I lived the in same precinct, and when he was in Congress, about once a mqnch, as I was waiting for the #6 bus downtown, the limo would turn the corner at 54th onto Hyde Park Blvd., the door would open and Congressman Washington would open the door, get out and invite me to ride with him. I actually believe he timed it so that a large number of people were waiting at the corner when he picked me up. I would get in and we would laugh all the way downtown. I loved all the pomp and circumstance too! Of course chat all came to an end when he was elected Mayor. I would see that limo turn the corner onto the Hyde Park Blvd and keep going. I mentioned this to him when I saw him at an event and told him that apparently I was no longer good enough to ride with the mayor of Chicago, and about a week later, as I was again waiting for the bus, the limo rounded the corner, it stopped, the Mayor got out and invited me into the car, talking to whoever remained at the bus stop. He smiled and asked me how I felt riding with the Mayor of the city of Chicago and I told him how excited I was. He said, "well, good, I'm glad you are enjoying it because this is your last free ride!" And it was.

He would talk to me about the vibrancy of the neighborhood and about the integrity it produced. He also told me that Hyde Park was one of the few places where he could truly be himself in the midst of all the political machinations because in Hyde Park everything was political, and familiar, from the hundreds of meetings on everything, to the passion of

the causes and the arrogance of "divine right." It was a place where he could be anyone he wanted to be and not worry about who he was supposed to be.

I still have his home phone number and periodically get ready to throw it out because someone else has it now, but I can't, and I still think of him sometimes when I am waiting for that bus in the morning and a long black car turns at the corner of 54th and Hyde

Park Blvd. and heads downtown. CD:l

Teach Us to Tango

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Spring 2005

The Purloined Bug Comes to Hyde Park

Saturday, February 19, 2005, dawned cool and bright, a perfect day to sleuth for exotic wildlife in Hyde Park. Wait a minute! Wildlife in Hyde Park? In February?? A lot of people seemed to think so.

Professor Michael C. LaBarbera of the Department of Organism al Biology of the University of Chicago had come to speak to members of the Hyde Park Historical Society and other interested individuals about bugs. Bugs??

It seemed that many people are interested in crawlers, buzzers, chirpers, flitters, and creatures that bite and sting. In fact, so many people came that a second program had to be scheduled for the following

Eastern Tiger Swallow

week. Rumor had it that the Society was dickering with the United Center for a venue for a third presentation. A front page article in the Chicago Tribune no doubt contributed to the general interest-venturesome sorts from as far away as Deerfield and Naperville drove in to see what our small, urban community had to offer in the way of

assassin bugs, cicada killers, and other creatures of the ground, leaves, flowers, and air.

Professor LaBarbera, who specializes in form and function in marine invertebrates, wanted to see how many kinds of arthropods-generally small creatures such as insects and spiders with multiple legs and shiny outer coverings-he could find in Hyde Park. Armed with camera and notebook, he began his search in the area running east to west from Stony Island Avenue to Drexel Boulevard, and north to south from 56th to 59th Streets.

To his astonishment, he found 120 different kinds of arthropods-gaudy black-and-yellow striped beetles,

Cucumber Beetle

tiny candy-striped leafhoppers adorned in bands of blue and red, and two kinds oflady bugs, one a recent arrival from Asia. The audience oohed and aahed at the magnificent black-and-yellow garden spider that had built an impressive orb web in the garden just east of Ray School. A tiny jumping spider, scarcely one-quarter of an inch long, stalked prey, its four forward-directed eyes agleam with anticipation.

Approving smiles greeted butterflies that flashed on the screen: clouded sulfur, tiger swallowtail, and a tiny purple hairstreak. Less spectacular but still lovely were small wasps bees, and beetles.

Professor LaBarbera gave people a new appreciation of the richness of life just beyond the doorstep. He also raised a warning flag about one of the most numerous arthropods in Hyde Park, a small millipede that in recent years apparently migrated from southeast Asia. These creatures, between one and one-and-one-half inches long, often are found crawling on sidewalks, especially near gardens mulched with shredded bark. They look innocuous enough, but seem to have taken over the ecological niche of native species of millipedes.

Unidentified species of caterpillar

There is little doubt that Professor LaBarbera inspired his audience to take a closer look at the smaller denizens of Hyde Park. Will a new legion of wildlife photographers emerge? Time will tell!

Sprlng 2005

Celebrating the Bird of Peace

On Easter Island, legend has it that a bird-god laid the egg from which the world hatched. Hyde Park sculptor Cosmo Campoli said, "The egg is the most exquisite shape there is. You hold one in your hand and you are holding the whole universe."

Cosmo Campoli (1923-1997) created a sculpture, Bird of Peace, affectionately known as "The Egg," a five-foot bronze bird with the body of an egg. Its two legs are clutching two eggs. Except for short periods when it was away for repair, the sculpture has resided in Nichols Park since its dedication on June 3, 1970.

On March 19, 2005, between 75 and 1,00 adults and children came to Nichols Park to celebrate the rededication of the Bird of Peace, now buttressed by proximity to the golden-toned brick walls of the new Nichols Park Fieldhouse. The Bird is held securely in place on a granite "nest."

Alderman Toni Preckwinkle pays tribute to Cosmo Campoli

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Bird of Peace, sculpture by Cosmo Campoli in Nichols Park

Speakers paying tribute to Cosmo Campoli and the Bird included Fourth Ward Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, Stephanie Franklin of the Nichols Park Advisory Council, daughter Anna Campoli Kolata, conservator Andrezej Dajnowski, and friend Robert Borja. Borja commenced that, "The egg is a yin shape

... that contains something." Quoting Victor Hugo, Borja said, "There is nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening." He concluded by saying, "Within eggs something is evolving and growing in identity and strength. For Cosmo it is peace."

Activities following the ceremony included music, games, face-painting, and crafts for children.

Photographs of Cosmo Campoli's work on display in the fieldhouse revived memories of this notable Hyde Park artist. W

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Memories of Greenwood Row

By Judy Allen

n the last newsletter, Joe Marlin gave you the background on our Greenwood row houses. I really wish I had known the developer. Mr. Samuel E.

Gross sounds like a fascinating person who organized picnics, transportation, etc. to get people co visit and hopefully buy in his new developments. I want co follow up Joe's article with some stories from when my husband and I were raising our children here.

Having been in the same house for almost half a

century, I have many, many memories. I have started to write or retell some of the for my nine grandchildren, and will share a few stories with you.

I grew up at 46th and Drexel Avenue, my husband at 44th and Drexel Avenue, but we did not meet until we went to college. I had already started at what was then Chicago Teachers College, at 68th and Stewart Avenue. Pat had graduated four years before from Hyde Park High School, and then joined the navy. I

knew his younger sister Barbara from college so met him when he entered college under the GI bill. ►8

-c O We married after Pat graduated, and lived for a while with my parents at 48th and Ellis. Months later, when we found that a baby was on the way we needed to find our own place to live.

We already knew we wanted to stay in the neighborhood. We wanted to be near family and friends, and we wanted the same cultural and religious diversity that we found in our families. We felt that the most important gift we could give our children was to raise them to get along with all kinds of people. So, every week we read the Hyde Park Herald to see what apartments we could find.

We almost did nor stop here on Greenwood when apartment hunting. Looking at all the houses on this side of the street, we were sure that the ad must be a misprint. We rang the bell, and met Mary O'Brien, the original owner of the house. She was in her 80's, widowed, and some years before we came along, had had the 2nd floor of her home converted inco an apartment. So, five months before our son Brian was born, we moved in. Sixteen months later our son Shawn was born.

One night, Mrs. O'Brien rang the doorbell, and asked me to stay with her because she did not feel well. She was worse the next day, so we called her friends who came over and took her to the hospital. Because of a serious stroke, she then went into a nursing home and for a few years, we took care of the building, the snow, and the mail. During one visit to her in the nursing home, she said that she realized

that she would never walk again and offered to sell the house to us. We were delighted, especially since another baby, our daughter Lisa, was then on the way.

It was so easy to raise our children here. As we met the families at our end of the block, we all became part of our own special community. Tom and Laura Cosgrove lived at 5200 Greenwood. Tom had been brought to the U of C to develop a Great Books style program for blue collar workers. So, there were lots of great discussions in front of their fireplace or ours, sharing of food, drinking cheap red wine ($2.50 a gallon), and their three children playing with our three. New neighbors with two children moved into 5202. Soon a new family moved into 5208 with their two girls. We all put gates in our back yard fences so the kids could go from yard to yard without going onto the street. Our yards were wonderful. Our property, including houses and yard, was 20 feet wide and 175 feet deep. When leaves were on trees and bushes in the summer, we felt that we were in the country, not in the city. We had one rule-no playing in the back yard until after 8AM on the weekends.

Then all our back doors were unlocked with funny results. How many times was I working in the

kitchen, not paying attention to who came in and who went out, only to find an extra child sleeping on our couch, or waiting at the breakfast table to eat ( a second breakfast in some cases).

After work or on the weekend, it was not unusual for someone co suggest that we eat cogether. So we had some odd combinations of food for dinner, but we had lots of laughter and got to know each other better. In my family, Swedish crayfish dinners were common in August. First we made a trip co Andersonville for cheese, bread, sausage, and jars of cooked dilled crayfish. Then we would sit down to demolish the food, yelling "Skoal" with every sip of Aquavit, beer, or for the kids, a raspberry soft drink. Of course, you know that there is very little co eat in a crayfish, so we each had to crack and eat at least 30 of them, along with the cheese and sausage, to make a meal. That meal would last for hours, and would often end with my father offering to marry all the females at the

table.

As the kids grew older, they would ride their bikes down the block, play with the other kids, and we never had co worry. Doug Mazique, Sr., was often sitting in front of his house, watering the grass. Mrs. Scott was often at her apartment window across the street. Mrs. Waters lived near the middle of our block and these people, along with other neighbors, scolded our kids when they were doing something wrong, and then called us co keep us informed. It truly was a special community.

At that time, Berkeley Avenue (the street in back of us) was very different between 52nd and 53rd street. A chain grocery store faced south (53rd street) and the side of the building was parallel to Berkeley. North of it, still on Berkeley, was a large auco repair garage, and right behind us ( facing 52nd street) was an apartment building. June, who lived in a 3rd floor apartment, also kept an eye on our kids. In back of these buildings, facing Ellis Avenue, was Chicago Osteopathic Hospital whose Emergency Room was in the right spot. Shawn fell out of the pear tree in our back yard and broke an arm; a bee stung one neighbor's child, another one had an allergic reaction to something he ate. We could run to the ER in 30 seconds flat!

On the south side of 53rd street, next to the alley, was one of the two Jesselson's fish stores that were in the neighborhood. (I forgot to tell you that all I could cook when I got married was popcorn and scrambled eggs.) My husband was a willing guinea pig for my cooking experiments. One day, I walked the kids co the fish score, announced that I did not know anything about cooking fish and could they please sell me something without bones and tell me how to cook

it. With great patience on their part, the Jesselsons gave me many informal lessons and I became a regular customer.

When we bought this house, there was a lot of remodeling to do. The original boiler took up a lot of space in the basement ( the old coal bin had been emptied) and there was no hot water heater. The original wallpaper, now more than SO years old, was on the living room walls (10 cents a roll according to Mrs. O'Brien) and the refrigerator in the kitchen had a circular motor on the top. So, weekends and vacations were busy and we continued to live in our own "construction zone." Now this was long before all the current home improvement shows were on TV, but

Pat was brave and neighbors were helpful. My husband would repair and put siding on a porch for one neighbor who in turn would help us with new plumbing. Another neighbor lent us her loom and taught us how to weave and Pat demolished her back porch for her. And so it went, our house being a cross between Grand Central Station and a construction zone.

During one of our projects, we left the house to buy some more building supplies. I thought Pat had the keys to the house, and he thought I had them. When we returned, we were completely locked out. We finally broke a long, narrow basement window and Shawn volunteered to be lowered in so he could unlock the front door. Honestly, we had the window boarded up within an hour, and none of us saw the male cat that must have gotten into our house. About eight weeks later, we could not find our "always indoor" cat. We finally found her but could not reach her. She had crawled into the open panel behind the new bathtub plumbing so she could have her kittens.

Since we could not reach her, we thought that when the kittens were old enough, she might carry them out or they would crawl out on their own. One night, lots of friends were over for dinner. Anyone who went into the first floor bathroom could hear a kitten meowing. So, we had a plan. We would chop open the wall and get the kitten out. We all agreed that the noise was about shoulder height, so Pat made a hole in the wall with his hammer. No kitten. We listened again and decided the kitten must be further down. So, we made another hole, a few feet lower. Guess what? No kitten. Finally, a third hole was made in the wall near the baseboard and there we found THREE kittens. They must have fallen between the walls on different days because the one on the bottom was very small and weak, and the one on the top was in good shape. But the wall was not and had to be rebuilt.

And so our kids grew and developed strong friendships with the neighborhood children. The large sandbox in our back yard was always filled with kids.

Dinner tables always had room for one more. Brian raised hamsters, gerbils, mice and rabbits in the back yard, and at one time turned the old coal bin into a darkroom. Shawn and his buddies developed a love for camping and all night rides to Winnetka on their bicycles. He and his friends set up a bicycle repair shop in the garage---called "Cycle Medics". This same group would spend the night in the back yard in their sleeping bags-in winter. I was sure that the neighbors would think I had locked them out of the house, especially the morning that we looked out and saw that their sleeping bags were covered with snow. Lisa loved to follow her father around the basement workshop and still has the two story doll house he made for her. She loved stuffed animals and her cats, especially Oscar who proudly brought her a gift from the backyard one day. He caught a bird and laid it on her pillow, proud to share his treasure.

Winter nights often meant a trip to Powell's bookstore where each child was given a few dollars to spend on books. Warmer nights might mean a trip to Court Theater (it was outside then), or a walk along Navy Pier, eating fried shrimps from the fish shack there while watching the ships from other countries unload their cargo. Or, a family favorite, a trip to Siebens brewery on the near north side where we could sit in their courtyard between the brewery buildings, eating wonderful sandwiches, washed down with root beer or their own special brew. That trip would

happen any time my father called to say it was hot out-and he felt hot quite often.

We read aloud to our children, even when they were pre-teens. The atmosphere had to fit the story. (This was something I learned from my mother who was an expert at telling ghost stories.) One night, during a mystery story that I was reading in the dark-using only a flashlight, a neighbor rang our doorbell. With a startled look on his face, he told us that his garage was on fire. We ran out the back door, grabbed the garden hose, and ran to put out the fire, only to discover that someone had forgotten to reconnect the hose to the outdoor faucet. It was a scene right out of the "Keystone Cops". Thank heavens the fire department arrived then so no one noticed our mistake.

As I look back, I remember so many other experiences (ask about our toothless dog that loved ice cream), the many all night card games with my husband's buddies who were also public school teachers, the chance to try new foods (yes, I did learn to cook!) and the many friends who are still in our lives. Those years were very special, and certainly the semi-attached row houses, the deep back yards, the variety of caring, wonderful people who lived in this

diverse community made it all possible. W

Lichens on the Rocks-and Trees

I met Rich Hyerczyk near the benches at the west side of the underpass to Promontory Point. He had not had time to eat before driving in from the western suburbs after work so appreciated the granola bars I had brought. In recent years I've met a lot of enthusiastic collectors of esoteric items-corkscrews, sand, shells, train schedules, but Rich was in a class alone. While we eyed the bark of trees and scrambled

Crustose lichen on a limestone block at the Point

about on the rocks near the water, Rich told me about his work, and his passion.

A machine designer by training, Rich is a young man with a mission. Since 1991 he has specialized in lichens, the small, crusty, flaky, or or sometimes lacey organisms that grow by attaching themselves to tree trunks, sidewalks, cement posts, even such odd surfaces as old shoes and glass. Rich, with a degree in Botany from St. Xavier University in Joliet, is now Manager of Natural History Education at the Morron Arboretum. At present he is conducting a survey of the lichens of Cook County, including the major parks of Chicago.

He has found 112 species in Cook County, of which 45 are in Chicago's parks, and is looking for more.

He is the founder of the Chicagoland Lichenological Society, a group of about 40 members that go on collecting trips and attend lectures about lichens and plants, and has published a number of papers about lichens in state and local science journals. He was trained as a docent by Wanda Iza for the Chicago Park District in the late 1980's, and has worked in Jackson Park and Bobolink Meadow.

Rich's eyes gleamed as we found one type of lichen after the other. Using hand lenses, we identified five

kinds of lichens, including bright yellow Candelaria concolor, a flaky gray-green lichen, and tiny brown disc-like lichens with white rims all on a single concrete bench support. Gray-green and yellow clusters and streaks of these and other lichens added

color to the bark of trees. Nearer to the water's edge, I was astonished to learn that the blackish material dusting almost all limestone blocks and concrete surfaces is, in fact, a lichen.

Rich showed me several white spots about two inches in diameter on a limestone block close to the eastern end of the flat walkway around base of the Point. "Those are not paint spots," he said. "Watch." With a practiced finger he scratched the surface of one of the spots. A soft green color emerged. "That's the photosynthetic part of this lichen, Verrucaria calkinsiana."

Contrary to common belief, lichens are not plants at all. Instead, each lichen is the product of a special relationship between a fungus and an alga or blue green bacterium. The fungus provides structure for the lichen and the green organisms produce sugars and oxygen photosynthetically. The two components can be separated from one another in a lab, but mixing them together again makes an amorphous blob nothing at all like the original lichen. In other words, said Rich, putting them together cannot "lichenize" them. Compounds such as lichenic acids and pigments can be produced only when both components are together. This summer the National Park Service launched a major project ro clean and restore the presidential heads at Mt. Rushmore. Rampant growth of lichens growing in cracks and crevices are producing acids that could damage the monument.

Lichens grow very slowly, and efforts to cultivate

Foliose lichen on a tree trunk at the Point

them rarely succeed. The fungus and algae in a lichen do not live together in genuine symbiosis, an association that works to the benefit of each organism. Instead, the fungus inserts tiny, nutrient-absorbing structures into the cells of the algae in a special, mild form of parasitism called helotism. The fungus's cell structure does not contain cellulose, as plants do, but chitin, the substance that makes up the hard outer covering of insects and other arthropods.

For years I had been advising my students, friends, and other co-travelers in the Great Outdoors of Hyde Park to keep their eyes and ears open. "Pay attention," I would say. "Look at trees, planes, bugs, clouds, Lake

A New Book About Earl Dickerson

HPHS members should all watch out for a new book, Earl B. Dickerson, A Voice for Freedom and Equality, by Robert J. Blakely with Marcus Shepard.

This book, which

will be published by Northwestern University Press in late summer, is one of a series of books about Chicago leaders in civil rights and community governance.

To get away from

racial oppression, at iii age 15 Earl

§o Dickerson (1891-

:; 1986) stowed away

._..... i on a train from

Earl Burrus Dickerson, November, 1983 Mississippi to

V Memorial on Blackstone Takes on a New Meaning

The story behind this concrete V on the northeast corner of Blackstone Avenue and 56th Street, long believed to be the site of one of several victory gardens planted in Hyde Park during World War II, has been fOLrnd to be more detailed and more poignant that first thought.

In early June, in a letter to the Hyde Park Historical Society, Ms. Damaris Day of South Kenwood Avenue wrote that, "The V was not a victory garden V, but

part of a memorial erected by the building's janitor for

Michigan. Check sidewalk cracks and gutters for moss and migrating ants. Listen for the warning chirp of a robin who has spotted a roaming cat. Listen again for the wheezy whine of a young crow begging tidbits from its parents. There's a whole ecosystem just out the window. Look for it!"

After meeting with Rich, I found myself ashamed that for all the years I'd been tooling about Hyde Park with binoculars and hand lens, I had been totally oblivious to these common, easily found bits of life lichens. This has now changed. These fascinating organisms are there for us all to see, adding a bit more

diversity to our biologically rich community. FSV

Chicago, thus beginning a lifetime journey to fight racial injustice. In the book, Blakely tells how Dickerson worked his way through preparatory schools, college, a segregated officers' training school, and the University of Chicago Law School. Upon graduation, his courage and character led him to undertakings never before attempted by an African American: general counsel to the first insurance company owned and operated by African-Americans, the first African-American Democratic alderman elected to the Chicago City Council, and the power behind Hansberry v. Lee, the U. S. Supreme Court case leading to the end of racist real estate covenants.

This book about the "dean of Chicago's black lawyers" belongs on Hyde Park bookshelves. No, this book belongs in the hands of Hyde Parkers and all other people interested in the battle for racial justice in Chicago.

The Chicago Community Trust supported the publication of these books by Northwestern University Press. The series, entitled Chicago Lives, includes Challenging the Daley Machine: A Chicago Alderman's Memoir, by Leon Despres with Kenan Heise, and Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America, by Truman K. Gibson,Jr. with Steve Huntley. FSV

his son killed in World War II. It (once) contained a flag pole and an American flag."

Perhaps the V should be a tribute ro this young man's valor. FSV

S u m m e r 2 0 0 5

Undergrads Look at 55th Street

Non-interactive commuters on 57th St. Metra Platform.

On June 1, 2005, HPHS members and guests came to Society headquarters to see University of Chicago undergraduates' impressions of 55th Street, arguably the most important thoroughfare in the community, The students were all enrolled in an undergraduate seminar, 55th Street, taught by Ann Stephenson, a Ph.D. candidate in the University's Department of Arc History. For her, 55th Street as a place where" ... most major trends in American urban history and Chicago history are visible."

Students, most of whom are from out of town, rose to the challenge with creativity and enthusiasm.

Melissa Schmidt's sociological study of the Metra Station at 55th, 56th, and 57 Streets showed that riders seldom interact with one another, and were cool to her efforts to talk with them. She felt that the design of the station, with all benches facing the same way, discouraged people from talking to each ocher.

Lakshmi Shenoy detailed the history of Hyde Park's Compass Players, "the first modern improvisation comedy group in the world." As most Hyde Parkers know, the Compass Theater was founded 50 years ago near Jimmy's Woodlawn on 55th Street near Woodlawn Avenue.

Brianna English reported on the Lucky Strike Restaurant on the first floor of the University of Chicago parking garage at 5Sch Street and Ellis Avenue from a first-hand perspective-she works there. As as combination restaurant, bowling alley, and pool, the Lucky Strike serves a wide cross-section of south-siders.

Tasha Matsumoto prepared a beautifully detailed Calendar of Hyde Park History. She illustrated each month with a color image of a familiar Hyde Park feature, including the Statue of the Republic (Golden Lady in Jackson Park), the Museum of Science and Industry, and the statue of Karl von Linne on the Midway near Ellis Avenue. TheJanuary 16 entry notes that in 1896, Amos Alonzo Stagg coached the University of Chicago to victory over the University of Iowa. On May 24,1865, Mary Todd Lincoln arrived in Hyde Park after vacating the White House upon the assassination of her husband. The calendar is a fine history lesson for local residents.

Visitors were intrigued by Nicholas Poulas's report, a collection of "cognitive maps" of Hyde Park drawn by members of the class. Maps were minimalist, detailed, charming, and provocative.

These projects are now part of the Hyde Park Historical Society's archives. FSV

By Stephen Treffman

Jackson Park Beach Promenade and Concession Stand,

(Knight, Leonard and Company Publisher, Chicago,

c. 1890.) A follow-up to our story about the Paved Beach and the Iowa Building (Winter, 2003) is this view of the beach along Lake Michigan at about 57th Street. The concession or public facilities stand, shown at the upper right corner, was probably built before the Jackson Park Pavilion (the original Iowa Building) was constructed in 1888. It was made of wood and wrought iron and was demolished prior to the World's Columbian Exposition. It

appears to have been located on the site where the Fair's German Building (1893-1925) later stood.

School History Fair Draws Large Crowd

Fourteen enthusiastic middle and high school students described and demonstrated projects about a wide array of copies of local interest at the Hyde Park Hiscorical Society's annual Hiscory Fair June 12, 2005. Friends, family, and guests joined Society members, including Fair coordinacor Priya Shimpi, co learn about Chicago blues, Pilsen neighborhood's "Little Mexico," rhe hiscory of Frank Lloyd's Architecture, South Side Murals, Soccer in the Croatian Community, and a number of other topics that caught the fancy of these young people.

Candice Welch, a freshman at Hyde Park High School, was given the Chicago Metro History Fair's award for the best project about Hyde Park. Her project, Aitchpe, was about the hiscory of her school's yearbook. Anja Rieser of the Ancona School's compelling project, What's the Point? The History

Hyde Park High School student Candice Welch is awarded top prize for her project, Aitchpe, about the history of her school. Awards were distributed by Priya Shimpi, coordinator of the fair for the Society

and Conflict at Promontory Point, tied for first prize with schoolmate Olivia Carlize's project, The Murals of the South Side.

When it comes co inspiring students co learn history, Cory Stutts, the teacher at the Ancona School, is a natural. That the lion's share of projects came from this school should be no surprise. "It is important to let them follow their own interests," says Ms. Stutts. "I encourage them co start with an area they are interested in, like the arts, or sports, or particular events they are curious about. Then they do research and talk co people, the librarian, parents, teachers, local historians."

"They can be very resourceful, talking with activists and aldermen ... Doing some kind of hiscory fair research is a school requirement, (and) kids get enthusiastic about local copies or places that are familiar to them. They stare co see their familiar surroundings a little bit differently."

For her outstanding work with Ancona students, Cory Stutts was given special recognition and a big round of applause. FSV

Anja Rieser of Ancona School prepared this project about Promontory Point

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The Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse and its Architect, Argyle E. Robinson

The Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse in 1905. The building doubled in size and took on its current appearance with the north addition, built in 1907.

By Leslie Hudson

building in Hyde Park is turning one hundred years old this year. This building doesn't call much attention

co itself. Driving by you might notice its bright orange awning but, unless you have rented a space within it, you may never have stopped to study the structure. But the next time you pass by, do stop-it's a unique and important building that deserves a good long look. It is the Hyde Park Self Storage building at 5155 Sou th

Cottage Grove Avenue, originally called the Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse.

Construction of the Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse began in 1905 during a period when many household storage buildings were being erected in Chicago, especially in its southern residential areas. Other warehouses built during this storage building heyday were once located nearby on Cottage Grove and Drexel Avenues.

Although these other warehouses have been demolished, the Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse survives, and even continues to operate as a storage warehouse-its original function. And, thanks to the building's sturdy design and construction, and careful stewardship by its owners over the years, the building's original exterior has

remained intact. Today the building looks almost identical to its appearance in ►8

-<O photographs from the early 1900s.

The Washington Park Warehouse was constructed in two phases. If you stand across Cottage Grove and look at the front of the building you notice that the design on the facade repeats itself on the right and left

sides. The right (southern) half corresponds to the first building, constructed on the corner of 52nd Street in 1905. In 1907 the warehouse doubled in size when a nearly identical building was added to the north. The double vertical band in the center of the building marks the junction of the two buildings.

The building looks a bit like a solid brick cube. Its unusual appearance is mostly due to the job it was designed for, providing fireproof storage. The building has very few windows, and most are small, to deprive potential fires of oxygen. Only the office, located on the first floor, was provided with large windows. A

most noteworthy features of the building and was probably the work of northern European immigrants, whose skill with masonry can be seen on many important buildings from the Chicago School period. Also distinctive are the three framed panels, centered above the building's Cottage Grove entrance, which originally contained terracotta lettering that read "The Washington Park Fire Proof Ware House." The lettering in the upper panels has been removed so that today it simply reads "Fire Proof Ware House."

The unusual brickwork seen on the Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse was a hallmark of its architect, Argyle E. Robinson. Sixteen Chicago buildings are known to have been designed by Robinson. Of these, twelve are still standing and four are located in Hyde Park. The Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse was one of Robinson's earliest comm1ss1ons.

Argyle Robinson's father, Colin Robinson, came to the United States from Argyleshire, Scotland in 1830. He married Ann Eggleston, of New York, and they settled in Bloomington, Illinois, where their two children, William Colin Robinson and Argyle Eggleston Robinson, were born (in 1868 and 1872). In 1874 the Robinson family moved to Hyde Park.

Argyle attended Hyde Park High School and rhe Chicago Manual Training School. He then studied architecture at the Armour Institute ofTechnology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) and, from 1896-7, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1898, Argyle married Elizabeth Burleson, of Chicago, and in 1900 he began practicing architecture in downtown Chicago. The couple remained in Hyde

1913 postcard of the Washington Park Fire-Proof Warehouse, Silver Vaults Park, residing first with Argyle's parents at 5400

building with so few windows presented the architect Jefferson (now Harper) Avenue; they later lived at with two problems: one, he wasn't able to ornament 5406 and 5227 Harper Avenue. Argyle and

the building in the usual way by using pleasing Elizabeth's only child, Margaret, was born in 1899. arrangements of windows, and two, he had large Another early Robinson design was the

expanses of blank wall. His solution was to cover the Underwriters Laboratories Building, built the same entire surface of the building with raised brick year as the Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse. It's patterns. He ran brick stripes across the center of the possible that a family connection led to this important facades, outlined the building's edges with a band commission for Robinson.

pattern, and placed star motifs in the upper corners. Underwriters Laboratories was formed shortly after A critic in 1908 observed, "(The architect} has the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, which had

treated the flat surface nearly as a designer of rock-cut popularized the use of electricity. In the electric

tomb fronts would have proceeded in Asia Minor industry's early years electrical fires were common and about three hundred years B.C." A little disappointed, it was soon apparent that product testing and safety he continues: "We must approach a building like this standards were needed. Argyle's older brother, W. C. one without too strong an architectural leaning. We Robinson (also a Hyde Park resident), helped found must accept it as a huge square-edged block of solid Underwriters Laboratories, was one of its safety material which the artist has been obliged to treat engineers, and eventually became a company vice- with patterns in slight relief. .." (Russell Sturgis, from president. An expert on fire prevention and

The Architectural Record.) protection, WC. often lectured on fire safety. He gave The craftsmanship of this brickwork is one of the talks with titles such as "Iron Fire Door and Shutter,"

full 005

and spoke to the Fire Insurance Club of Chicago about the use of automatic sprinklers in buildings.

In 1905 Underwriters Laboratories was ready to move out of makeshift facilities and into a building better suited for their purposes. The building they hired Argyle Robinson to design for them was located at 207 East Ohio Street and housed the company's main office and the testing laboratories. Like his Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse, the Underwriters Laboratories Building was of brick construction and, because it contained laboratories to conduct tests of flammability and combustion, it too was extremely fireproof. The exteriors looked similar as well; both buildings featured raised brick strip

The Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse today.

designs and terra cotta lettering panels. The Underwriters Laboratories Building well served the U.L.'s needs and also provided architects and the business community with a model of fireproof construction.

The Underwriters Laboratories Building was expanded numerous times. Argyle Robinson designed the first addition, constructed in 1908. Later additions by Schmidt, Garden and Martin closely followed Robinson's initial buildings. In 1979 Underwriters Laboratories moved their main office to Northbrook, Illinois, and the Ohio Street building became vacant.

Despite efforts to save the building-it was considered for both Chicago Landmark designation and National Register listing-the Underwriters Laboratories Building was demolished in 1981-82. The Grand Ohio Condominiums, built in 1984, now stands on the site.

In the years immediately following the construction of the Underwriters Laboratories Building and the Washington Park Fireproof Warehouse, Robinson designed three residential buildings in Hyde Park. All are still in existence. The William G. Hale House, located at 5757 South Kimbark Avenue, was built in 1908 and for many years was the home of Florence Lowden Miller. Florence Miller was the daughter of

Frank Lowden, a U.S. Representative and Governor of Illinois, and of Florence Pullman, daughter of George Pullman and namesake of Pullman's Hotel Florence. The William

G. Hale House seems atypical of Robinson's work, perhaps because it was extensively remodeled in the 1930s or 1940s. Next door, at 1308 East 58th Street and also built in 1908, is the James Parker Hall House. Hall was one of the original faculty members of the University of Chicago Law School. Hyde Park's third Robinson residential building is located around the corner, at 5714 South Kenwood. It is an L- shaped apartment

building that was built in 1909 for the Chicago Theological Seminary. Robinson's plan allowed for possible future expansion to the south. The addition of a mirror-image structure (planned, but never constructed) would have created a U-shaped building surrounding a central courtyard.

Argyle Robinson was active in the Chicago Architects' Business Association and by 1913 was serving as its president. In 1912 there was an architecture scandal in Chicago when the Home Theater collapsed; shoddy workmanship and unsafe designs were subsequently discovered in other ►9

rnll 2005

- theaters. Argyle Robinson made strong statements in defense of public safety, decrying faulty construction practices, questioning the qualifications of the Board of Examiners and raising the issue of inadequate licensing examinations for architects.

Elizabeth Robinson, Argyle's wife, died in 1903. In 1911, Argyle married Maude Leonard Towson and sometime after 1916, Argyle, Maude and daughter Margaret moved from Hyde Park to Hinsdale. They resided there, at 35 (now 7) South Oak Street, until at

least 1938. A neighbor on Oak Street, incidentally, was fellow architect R. Harold Zook; Zook lived at 327 South Oak Street from 1924 to 1949. (Zook's home, threatened with demolition, has recently been in the news.)

Argyle Robinson's business office remained in downtown Chicago after the move to Hinsdale, and Robinson continued to figure prominently in Chicago's architectural community. In 1926, Mayor William E. Dever appointed him to the position of City Architect, a post Robinson held until 1929. During this period he designed many firehouses constructed throughout the city. In 2003, four of these firehouses were designated Chicago Landmarks. Two can be seen near Hyde Park, at 5349 South Wabash Avenue and 4600 South Cottage Grove Avenue.

The last building Robinson was involved with seems to have been the Central Police Station at 1121 South State Street, built in 1928 while he was City Architect. The building was designed by the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, with Robinson acting as associate architect. When it was finished the

new police station made headlines because it utilized a novel barless window device, the "detention window", intended to make the structure look more like an office building and less like a prison. For many years the building served as the Chicago's police headquarters and jail. It was demolished in 2003.

The final years of Argyle Robinson's life are something of a mystery. It is not clear where he lived after 1938, when he stopped being listed in the Hinsdale telephone directory. The final public record of Argyle E. Robinson dates from 1945 and reports his burial in, surprisingly, Salt Lake City, Utah. According to the obituary, he died in the home of his daughter.

Argyle's second wife, Maude Robinson, lived until 1959. She is buried in Illinois, at Oak Hill Cemetery in Blue Island. The graves of other family members his parents, Colin and Ann Eggleston Robinson, and

his brother, W. C. Robinson (and W.C.'s wife and children)-are in Chicago, at Oak Woods Cemetery. W

Edited from a previously published article in theJuly 30, 2005 issue of the Hyde Park Herald.

Beatrix Potter and Lichens

By Caroline Herzenberg

I was inspired by Frances Vandervoort's interesting article about lichens in Hyde Park in the most recent issue of Hyde Park History ("Lichens on the Rocks - and Trees," Hyde Park History Vol. 27, #2, p. 4, summer 2005) to write a note about the history of our knowledge of lichens. These small organisms that we see growing on trees and rocks have been recognized since time immemorial, but it was not until the late 1800s that their extraordinary and unique character became known.

As a young woman, Beatrix Potter (yes, THE Beatrix Potter, author of "Peter Rabbit" and other children's stories) was an exceptionally talented amateur botanist. She had a deep interest in botany, especially in fungi and related organisms including lichens, and she advanced the new idea that lichens were not just a simple plant but rather were formed from a merger of fungi and algae in something like a symbiotic relationship. (According to the Hyde Park History article, this relationship is now recognized as helotism, a mild form of parasitism - I've just learned something new!).

This remarkable woman prepared a scientific paper on this subject that was presented to the prestigious Linnean Society in London in 1897. It's interesting (and depressing) to realize that her paper had to be

read by a male assistant from the Royal Botanical Gardens,

since women were not permitted in the Linnean Society at this time. Because Beatrix Potter

encountered so much prejudice in the scientific community, she curtailed her

scientific research and turned to writing, becoming the author that we know

her as today. That was a loss to science but a gain for literature, and especially for all those of us who grew up loving her children's stories.

r,.11 2005

Cornell and Despres Award Nominations due November 15

Members of the Hyde Park Historical Society are invited to submit nominations for the 2005 Paul Cornell Awards and for the Leon and Miriam Despres Awards, which will be presented in early 2006. The Cornell Awards, named after Hyde Park's founder, recognize individuals and organizations whose work exemplify the values and objectives of the Society: recording Hyde Park's history, preserving Hyde Park artifacts and documents, promoting public interest in Hyde Park history, and education. '

Despres Awards are given for preserving the built environment, including renovation and reconstruction of homes, historical buildings, and other architectural structures.

2005 Cornell awards were granted to Bruce Sagan, owner and publisher of the Hyde Park Herald, the Greenwood Row House Association, the City of Chicago Department of Transportation, and the Montgomery Place Book Committee. The first Despres award was granted to Leon and Miriam Despres for their work on behalf of Chicago's architectural heritage, including the preservation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House.

Anyone is eligible for the award except current HPHS Board members. Please send names and addresses of nominees for Cornell Awards to Fran Vandervoort, 5471 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60615, Tel: (773) 752-8374, or by e-mail: vandersand@sbcglobal.net. Send Despres Award nominations to Jack Spicer, 5536 S. Kimbark Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, Tel: (773) 324-5476, or e-mail: jackspicer@earthlink.net. Please include a few brief sentences describing why your think your candidate qualifies for an award.

Nominations will close November 15, 2005.

Found: Some Local Lichens

On October 29,

2005, about 35 Hyde Park nature lovers spent much of a perfect afternoon learning about some of the most cryptic of all organisms - lichens. Lichenologist Richard (Rich) D. Hyerczyk, Manager of Natural History Education at Morton Arboretum and naturalist with the

Joliet Park District,

Rich Hyerczyk demonstrates a model entertained his

of a lichen audience at the

HPHS headquarters with slides, stories, and actual samples of these crusty, flaky, and often colorful organisms.

After the talk, the group headed for Promontory

Correction...

In the article, "Lichens on the Rocks ... " (Summer, 2005), lichenologist Richard (Rich) D. Hyerczyk is

Members of the groups examine a lichen at Promontory Point

Point to see lichens adding color and texture to rocks, trees, and concrete. People departed with a new appreciation of these tiny, but important organisms.

described as graduating from St. Xavier University in Joliet. St. Xavier University is actually in Chicago. He works in Joliet as a naturalist with the Joliet Park District, and at Morton Arboretum.

r ., I I o o 5

Capturing Hyde Park History

By Theresa McDermott, Editor Emeritus Twenty-six years ago, January 1979, Volume 1

Number 1 of the Hyde Park Historical Society

Newsletter began publication with Muriel Beadle, Editor; Corinne Seither, Typist; and Michael Conzen, Graphics. Twenty-six years and 26 volumes later, the Newsletter has covered many of the Society's activities as well as many historical articles related to Hyde Park written and researched and sometimes discovered by members and friends of the Society.

Muriel Beadle continued as editor through 1981 and Maggie Bevacqua served from 1982 until 1985, when a committee of four-Anita Anderson, Rita Dukette, Penny Johnson and I agreed to take on the job. At various times for various reasons, others joined in the editing-Betty Borst, Margo Criscuola, and Mary Lewis-until 1993 when the job became mine.

Over the years, Society members and friends have graciously let us publish their research, their own histories, their related community activities, their findings in old publications and yearbooks, etc. In 1994, the Newsletter took on a new and more professional look as Nickie Sage, our Graphic Artist, did the layout and design of new issues. In 1996, at the suggestion of HPHS Board member, historian and author Jim Stronks, we ceased calling ourselves a newsletter and became Hyde Park History.

With a new name and new design and a good supply of member/authors as well as some professional and lay associates, we have published a history of Hyde Park and related places. Some of our contributors were

more than generous and more than able: Jim Stronks' recounting of All the Dead Young Men: Camp Douglas and Oak Woods Cemetery, (vol. 16 #1) and his Chicago Day at the Columbian Exposition (vol. 16 #3) "when some 761,942 souls would descend upon the bricks of Hyde Park/Woodlawn to squeeze through the turnstiles." His articles on The Collapsible Coliseum and the Cross of Gold, (vol.18 #3) and on Alonzo Stagg (vol. 18 #4) were a wonderful concoction of history and humor.

Several issues feature the column Notes from the Archives by Steve Treffman, HPHS board member and Archivist. A valued contributor over the years, Steve has also written some major articles such as one on Hyde Park/Kenwood Clubs (vol. 16 #2) and on Jean Block and her book: An Enduring Gift: Hyde Park Houses Twenty Years Later (vol. 20 #4) and

another on Cable Cars and Lunchrooms (vol 21 #3 and 4) and several others as well.

The list goes on...

Volume 17 (# 2 and 3) featured a wonderfully detailed and illustrated history, The Hyde Park Kenwood Urban Renewal Story by Oswalda Badal (illustrations by Michael McDermott); Jay Mulberry's article Bob Picken: Hyde Park's Candy Man (vol. 25 #1), John Allen on the IC; Alta Blakely on Steve's Lunch; Betty Borst, Carol Bradford, John Allen, John McDermott Jr., Edgar Rice Burroughs (from his school yearbook), Ed Campbell, Yaffa/Claire Draznin, Dev Bowley, Sam Hair ...

I believe most, if not all newsletter copy is available on our HPHS website so feel free to indulge yourself in some delightful Hyde Park history. And be sure to help our new editor, Fran Vandervoort, by offering your articles of interest, your history-stories and ideas to her. The hardest part of editing is getting enottf47I appropriate material in/at the appropriate time. •

rail 2005

Basketbal I, a Dentist, and a Ferris Wheel: Queries from the Outside World

By Carol Bradfort, HPHS President

Here are some of the interesting inquiries we've received this year.

• Inquiry from Hannah Hayes, granddaughter of John Hayes, whose family operated the Hayes Hotel in Woodlawn. The hotel opened in the early 1890s.

• Inquiry from Andy Schcoloik, owner/developer of the recently reopened Grand Ballroom at Cottage Grove & 64th Street, asking for photographs which might aid in the restoration effort, both interior and exterior.

• A woman who bought a box of stuff at a flea market in Delaware wrote about a man named Louis Triokaus, whose Hyde Park high school reports from 1924-1927 were in the box. He apparently was an artist and sculptor who later lived in Wilmington, DE.

• Staff member of HistoryMakers requested correct spellings of the names of members of the Hyde Park High School basketball team of 1956, for a transcript of a videotape where the names of team members are mentioned.

granddaughter of Paul Maull wrote for more information about the area where he grew up and attended high school. The family resided in one of the group of brownstones located 3979-3983 S. Drexel.

Two of the five in the row are still standing. She sent a box of memorabilia about her family, which has been deposited in our archive.

• Inquiry about Loraine Richardson Green, first African-American woman to receive a master's degree in Sociology from the University of Chicago (in 1919), and her husband, Wendell Green, the first African American circuit court judge in Chicago. The couple lived in Hyde Park.

• Request for confirmatioo--or refutation-of a family tradition that a couple named Von Siebenthal fell to their death from a gondola of the Ferris wheel during the Columbian Exposition, and their children were subsequently adopted by the family who were the proprietors of the Yellow Cab Company.

• Inquiry from Canada about William and Ano Powis who lived in Hyde Park Township in early 20th century.

• Woman in Carol Stream, Il asked about her grandfather, Al Gatti, who was the head chef at the Windermere Hotel in the early 1960s.

• An inquiry about a dentist named Frank Martin Richardson, who may have lived on Woodlawn Avenue and had an office at 25 East Washington Street.

. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::':.

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• A man from Flowery Branch, GA inquired about a

·•········· ·••···

fire station in the late 1880s called Oakland Hose 1.

i•·E···· AL KLINGER ON TOUR

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• Inquiry from Florida about a 1900 graduate of the

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Chicago School of Dentistry who was thought to have

:•:·:·:··:: How many of you saw the article in the

.:.:.:.:.:.

an office on Woodlawn Avenue.

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:.:.:.:.:..

November 2, 2005, edition of the Hyde Park

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• Woman in Fogelsville, PA asking about her father,

:::-:: Herald about HPHS member Al Klinger's --:::·::

Bertram B. Moss, who was an alderman in Hyde Park

:•:·:·:··:: bicycle tour of Europe? In the summer of 2004,

·:·:·:•·:•:

in the 1940s.

•·•·· ·····•

:::::: following the death of his wife Kitty, Al set out -:::::

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• Mao who used to look for military relics at a turn of

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.•.·.•.•.·

to tour Great Britain. The article describes his

·:·:·:·:•:

·.•.•.··.•.

the century dump site at Jefferson Barracks Missouri

:•:·:··:·: British tour, but he has many more stories to :::::

found a copper token inscribed "Midway Park 25". He wonders if it comes from Hyde Park, as he found it

with other items marked "World's Fair."

:::::- tell. We can look forward to reading them in

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:::::: future issues of Hyde Park History.

......

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:·:·:·:·:•:

• From Ellensburg, WA, Kathy Maull Wing,

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Hyde Park and the Wreck of the Lady Elgin

By Frances S. Vandervoort

"Tick-tock, tick-tock," said the big clock on a pole above our heads. Again, "tick-tock, tick tock," each pair of notes rising tentatively,

almost as if asking a question. As we looked up, the clock launched into a familiar melody. "Ninety years without stumbling, his life's seconds numbering..." The clock was on the corner of a busy intersection in Sapporo, Japan where, in June, 2003, my husband and I were spending a few days on a tour of northern Pacific islands. We began to sing the words. My husband and I sang this song when we were young, and found ourselves singing it again on a street corner in Japan.

Shortly after our return, we joined the Hyde Park Historical Society. Only then did we learn the story of the remarkable cottage at the rear of 5317 South Dorchester. The vertically cut wooden siding and sharply raked roof of this charming building long had intrigued us. Through the Society we learned that it had been built in 1859 or 1860 by Henry Clay Work, the composer of the song we enjoy so much.

One evening not long ago, I was listening with one ear to radio station WLS's nightly radio program, Extension 720. Through the mists of sleep I heard three words, Henry Clay Work! Instantly awake, I wrote down the name of the song being sung, Lost on

,the Lady Elgin. Hearing a guest describe the song as

one of the "saddest ever written," I committed myself to learning more about the song and the Lady Elgin disaster. I found out that the singer was Great Lakes balladeer Lee Murdock, whose fine voice caught the true tragedy of the event. Most of the song was composed by Work alone. Three verses added by Mr. Murdock offer more details of the tragedy, and are very much in keeping with Work's melodious, natural style. Lee Murdock's album, Safe in the Harbor,* contains a number of songs about the Great Lakes maritime industry.

This tragic wreck, which took place north of Chicago the night of September 8, 1860, had political ramifications extending far beyond Lake Michigan's shore. The following is a summary of a report by Lake Michigan historian Brendon Baillod that describes the wreck of the Steamer Lady Elgin. **

"The (wreck of) the Lady Elgin held the dubious distinction of being the worst loss of life on the Great Lakes until the steamer Eastland rolled over at her Chicago dock in 1915, killing 835, and the Elgin still ranks as the second worst wreck in the history of the Lakes."

The Lady Elgin was a handsome, double-decked• wooden sidewheel steamer built in 1851. She had

been built to run between Buffalo, Chicago, and ►@

-<O Lake Superior carrying passengers and freight. She was 252 feet long by 33,7 feet wide, and constructed of white oak with iron reinforced frames to carry 200 cabin passengers, 100 deck passengers, and 43 crew members.

The accident played a role in Wisconsin's Civil War politics. In 1860, Wisconsin was deeply involved in the debate over states' rights and the slavery question. The nation was nervously anticipating the results of the 1860 presidential election. Anti-slavery sentiment in Wisconsin was so strong that one legislator even introduced a motion that Wisconsin declare war against the United States unless slavery were abolished. Wisconsin's Republican governor had previously suggested that Wisconsin would secede from the Union if the Federal Government did not end slavery.

When secession began to look like a possibility, the State Adjutant General polled the State's militias to determine which would support the State and which would support the Federal Government if secession were to occur. In Milwaukee were four main militias, one of which was the Irish Union Guard of Milwaukee's Third Ward. Captain Garrett Barry, the commander of the Union Guard declared that, although he opposed slavery, he believed that any stand against the Federal Government would be treason. The Adjutant General immediately revoked Barry's militia commission and disarmed the Union Guard. The unit was incensed and refused to disband. It decided to raise money for rearming by commissioning an excursion on the Lady Elgin to Chicago where a Democratic

Party rally was to be held.

While there, they planned to call attention to their cause by holding a parade and

attending a speech by Illinois congressman and

presidential candidate, Stephen A. Douglas.

After a day of marching and politics, the travelers made their way to the wharf to board the Lady Elgin for departure. They were ready to leave at 11:00 PM, but Captain Jack Wilson was concerned about the threatening weather. Eager passengers and pressure to maintain a mail schedule convinced him to get underway. At approximately 11:30 the Lady Elgin departed the Chicago Harbor and headed into the open lake. At that point, it was not known exactly how many passengers were on board. It seems that a significant number of non-ticketed revelers had come aboard in Chicago to party and dance in the ship's spacious facilities, and may not have had a chance to disembark before departure.

The lake was running high, but the ship was making good time as it headed north through surging waves. Seven miles off Winnetka at about 2:30 A.M., passengers looking through portholes saw the lights of a ship rapidly approaching from the west and braced for a collision. The shock caused the ship to lurch onto her pore side, waking Captain Wilson and First Mate George Davis. Captain Wilson quickly determined that a massive amount of water had entered the engine room and ordered the Elgin turned toward shore. A few minutes later, in the pilothouse, he privately cold the mate that the Elgin. would never reach shore.

The vessel that rammed the Lady Elgin was the 129-

ft. schooner Augusta, bound for Chicago with a load of lumber. Despite gale force winds, she still had most of her sails up and was sailing out of control. Her deck load had shifted so that she was nearly on her side. Captain Darius Malott and his crew, fighting to regain control of the schooner, did not spot the Lady Elgin until it was too late. The Augusta charged into the side of the Lady Elgin just behind the port paddlewheel, burying her bowsprit in the side of the

larger ship.

/ The Augusta soon freed

// itself from the Lady Elgin.

/ I/ Captain Malott, mistakenly

. / / thinki?g his ship ha dealt

/ - • 1 the Elgm only a glancmg

t! blow and fearful that his

own ship might founder, immediately turned coward Chicago.

All was pandemonium on the Lady Elgin. In a desperate attempt to lighten the load the crew drove overboard 50 head of cattle that had been in pens below deck. Cargo,

Winfcr 2 0 0 6

including iron stoves, was moved to the starboard side in order to raise the hole in the port side out of water. Efforts to launch lifeboats failed. The Lad'y Elgin began to disintegrate, cutting off most passengers from life preservers. Within 20 minutes most of the ship was headed to the bottom.

When dawn broke, about 500 passengers were still floating on debris and broken decking. Though aided by relatively warm water, the churning surf tore infants from would-be rescuers' arms and stymied efforts of many to maintain secure grips on improvised rafts. Only 160 of the approximately 400 survivors who reached the shallows were able to make it to shore. Of the 430 or so confirmed lost, less than half were ever found.

Acts of heroism were the stuff of legend. Captain Wilson, trying to save two women from the waves, was killed when he was dashed on the rocks just off the shore. Edward Spencer, a Northwestern University student, repeatedly charged back into the waves to save, it is said, as many as 18 people. Afterward he became delirious, repeatedly asking, "Did I do my best'" His heroism later became the impetus for the Evanston, Illinois, United States Lifesaving Station.

When the crippled Augusta reached harbor she was leaking badly, Captain Malott was horrified to learn that the Lady Elgin had gone down. The public and the press soon began to attack him as an agent of the Confederacy as well as an agent of pro-Confederacy Britain, where he had spent some time. Many felt that the ramming was deliberately planned to get rid of the Milwaukee Irish militia on board. The Augusta's name was quietly changed to the Captain Cook, after which she had a long career on the Lakes until she was wrecked near Cleveland in 1894.

Captain Malott and his crew eventually found work on the bark Mojave. Four years almost to the day after the Lady Elgin disaster, the Mojave disappeared without a trace, possibly in the waters of northern Lake Michigan. Speculation was rife that the crew, all

but one of whom had been aboard the Augusta, had been lynched in response to the Lady Elgin disaster.

Republican Governor Randall of Wisconsin, who had disarmed the Irish Union Guards, was regarded a villain. The incident further increased tensions between Democrats and Republicans over issues of states rights and slavery.

Written shortly after the disaster, Henry C. Work's

song, Lost on the Lady Elgin, rose in popularity to become one of the nation's best-known songs. It is fitting that this early Hyde Parker used his talents to commemorate a tragedy that, had there not been

political tensions over states' rights and slavery, probably would not have happened at all. Cliil

*Safe in the Harbor. Lee Murdock, Depot Recordings, 123 South Hough Street, Barrington, IL 60010. Contact: Artists of Note, P. 0. Box 11, Kaneville, IL 60144-0011. (708) 557-2742.

**Excerpted from The Wreck of the Steamer Lady Elgin, by Brendon Baillod.

w n l f' r 2 0 0 G

A Mathematician 1n Hyde Park

By Peter Vandervoort

Abraham Adrian Albert (1905-1972) was Dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences during my early years on the faculty of the University of Chicago.

When I went to see him one day on some matter of University business, I found him seated at the Dean's desk with a pen in his hand and several pages of mathematical calculations in front of him. I commented on finding him doing research in an administrative office of the University; he replied simply that it was something that he must do. For this junior faculty member, Adrian Albert was a personification of the University. That is how he was portrayed by his daughter, Nancy E. Albert, in a lecture "A. A. Albert: A Chicago Academic in Turbulent Times," given at the Historical Society on December 3, 2005. The lecture was based on her recent book A3 & His Algebra (New York: iUniverse, Inc, 2005).

The lecture began with an account of the early history of the University of Chicago and its Department of Mathematics, continued with a description of Adrian Albert's early life in Chicago, and then brought the two stories together with Albert's entrance into the University, at the age of 16, in 1922. He completed work for his B.S. degree in 1926, for his M.S. degree in 1927, and for his Ph. D. in 1928. His most distinguished teachers in the Department of Mathematics were E. H. Moore, the founder of the Department, and L. E. Dickson, under whom Adrian did the research for his doctoral dissertation. Adrian Albert was to be counted as belonging to the second generation of mathematics students at the University.

Professors and students soon recognized Albert as a gifted mathematician of the highest order, and he had a spectacular career as a student. He became known as "A Cubed," a nickname that was an inside joke for mathematicians and a mark of the awe and affection with which he was regarded. Adrian chose to specialize in algebra, the branch of mathematics in which L. E. Dickson was the acknowledged American leader.

Adrian Albert has described modern algebra as "concerned with the study of certain mathematical objects called algebraic systems." An algebraic system consists of a set of elements (e.g., common numbers), one or more operations (e.g., addition and/or multiplication), and a set of defining postulates, which are rules telling us how the elements behave when we apply the operations to them (e.g., when we

add or multiply two or more numbers). The "algebra" that most of us learn in school is one of many algebraic systems. When Adrian began his studies, algebra had become a highly abstract discipline in which researchers sought to discover or construct new algebraic systems and, by proving theorems, work out their properties. Adrian took up research in algebra with great skill and enthusiasm and soon obtained results that placed him at the forefront of the subject.

For a portion of his doctoral dissertation, Albert investigated and solved a fundamental problem suggested by Professor Dickson on the classification of

Nancy Albert

division algebras, algebraic systems that include the operation of division. It was an unsolved problem at the forefront of Dickson's own research, and it had stymied Dickson and other mature mathematicians. The young man's achievement was recognized with the award of a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship, which enabled him to spend the 1928- 1929 academic year at Princeton University.

At Princeton, Solomon Lefschetz introduced Albert to certain unsolved problems in the theory of Riemann matrices, which are mathematical objects introduced in the nineteenth-century by Bernhard Riemann in the study of curved surfaces. The algebraic methods that Albert had mastered were• ideal tools for the study of Riemann matrices. Albert began research into the subject, which he continued,

W n·•'r '006

along with his work in algebra, as an instructor at Columbia University in 1929-1931 and later in his career. For his research on Riemann matrices, Albert received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra, one of the most prestigious awards of the American Mathematical Society, in 1939. Albert returned to the University of Chicago in 1931 as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics. Chicago was to be his academic home for the remainder of his life.

Albert's reputation and standing as a leading American algebraist was established by his contributions to the classification of division algebras. This was an interest that he shared with the German mathematician Helmut Hasse. The two began an extensive correspondence in which they shared their ideas and results. Nancy Albert presented an account of the association of the young American • mathematician and the older German colleague as a complex story of growing friendship and collegiality with elements of competition for priority in fundamental discoveries. Albert and Hasse approached the proof of the fundamental theorem in the subject in a sequence of steps consisting of proofs of preliminary theorems and other results. By the autumn of 1931, Albert had assembled all of the preliminary results required for the proof of the fundamental theorem. In the meantime, Hasse, working with different methods and in collaboration with Amalie Noether and Richard Brauer, had found his way to the final proof. The three

German mathematicians published their result in a

academic and non-academic administrative posts. Those activities reflected his interest in the promotion of research and teaching in mathematics and other sciences, his concern for the plight of American mathematicians unable to find jobs during the Great Depression and the plight of foreign mathematicians driven from their homelands by the rise of fascism, his concern for the national interests in time of war and cold war, and his interest in the well-being of universities-particularly his University of Chicago. Adrian Albert's career at the University of Chicago culminated with his appointment as Chairman of the Department of Mathematics (1958-1961) and as Dean of the Division of the Physical Science (1961-1971).

As the title of Nancy Albert's lecture suggests, Adrian Albert's career as a mathematician spanned a half-century of difficult times. The Great Depression, the rise of fascism, the Second World War, the cold war, urban renewal, and the unrest of the 1960s all affected his life and career. As a person, as a mathematician, and as a member of the University, he steered a remarkably steady course through the turbulence. Inevitably, a brief lecture on an important subject leaves one wishing to know more. Happily, one can fulfill that wish in the present instance with Nancy Albert's very interesting

and satisfying biography of her father. CliD

li :•-:._! ;: ::: :: :: :;: :::::: ;:;:;:::::::;:::;:;;:;:!:;:;::;:;:;:::;:;:;:::;::;:;:;::;;::;:::;:;:;:;;:;::;::;:;::;:::;:::::::::;:::;r:r:{•; I;

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joint paper. The question arose, and it seems not yet to have been fully resolved, as to whether or not Albert

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HYDE PARK HISTORY ·:•J•··I·

should have been included as a co-author. However,

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Albert and Hasse subsequently published a joint paper giving a clear account of the contribution of each to the final result. Thus Albert received the credit that he deserved for his part in the work.

Notwithstanding his concentration on algebra as a

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::::: Saturday, March 25, 2 - 4:30 p.m. :::::

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::::: Hyde Park Neighborhood Club • 5480 S. Kenwood :::::

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branch of "pure" mathematics, Albert also had an

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Show and Tell what they know about our history :·:·:·:·:•:

interest in more practical applications of the subject. While Albert was at the Institute for Advanced Study

in 1933-1934, the physicists PascualJordao,John von Neumann, and Eugene Wigner introduced him to

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:::::: by bringing their personal memorabilia to the club ::::::

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certain algebraic problems that arise in quantum

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churches, clubs, and institutions are encouraged .·:·:•:·:•:

theory. As a result, Albert's research efforts broadened

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to include so-called Jordan algebras. Albert turned to

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even more practical applications of algebra during the

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Second World War, when he joined war-related research efforts in the field of cryptography.

As Albert's standing in mathematics rose, his contributions to the subject extended beyond his own

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:::::. Note that we are not asking for donations of

::::: materials, but only inviting you to display them for

:•:·•:·:·: this program so that others may enjoy them, as

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research and teaching. He organized conferences, served on committees and in offices of professional societies, served on government panels and committees, and held

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W I n f c r 2 0 0 G

An Earnest Plea for the Newsletter

Please, dear members, hear my plea, We're much in need of a good story.

Read a good book, consider a tree, Take a boat trip on our inland sea.

Is there a special garden that catches your eye? A coach house, and alley, don't pass them by!

There's lots to see and lots to write, Let's count on you to set things right!

Has anyone ever:

• Looked for treasure in a modest alley?

• Read a book with a local perspective'

• Enjoyed a small community park and wanted to know more about it?

• Known someone with an interesting hobby involving Hyde Park?

• Known a local storyteller? Where does rbat person find bis/her stories?

• Known a local naturalist? What is that person's special interest?

• Known someone with a special talent in music or dance?

There are lots of stories germinating out there? Let's help them bloom!

HYDE PARK LICHEN

j PROJECT BEGINS ON FEBRUARY 12,2006

Richard D. Hyerczyk, Manager of Natural History Education at Morton Arboretum, will begin his Hyde Park Lichen Project on Sunday, February 12, 2006. All interested individuals are invited to meet at 2:00 P.M. at the Darrow Bridge in Jackson Park. Members may remember his lecture and highly successful tour of lichen sites on Promontory Point last October. Throughout the spring, Rich will be surveying lichens in Jackson Park, Burnham Park from 47th to 56th Streets, Midway Plaisance, Kenwood and Nichols Park, and Washington Park.

Future dates will be announced by mail and the Internet. For further information, contact Rich at rhyerczyk@chicagolichens.com.

The Lichen Project is co-sponsored by the Hyde Park Historical Society and the Jackson Park Advisory Council.

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\V nle,· 2006

by the Quadrangle Club.

His topical verses characterizing and satirizing the foibles of faculty and community were pointed but not unkind and, equally importantly, were a joy to set to music. As a sample, in an all-time favorite summing up the U of C (written for the 1981 Revels and reprised many times since) the chorus begins:

It's just a somewhat-kind of place, In fact a you know-kind of spot, And it's as though well-so to speak, It's practic'ly unique,

'Cause it's got what it's got

Another perceptive sendup on a Hyde Park institution, in this case the Co-Op, was the lyric for a duet originally appearing the 1959 Revels:

Love came to us in the Household Supplies, Lux was the light that came true

Walled off by lots of that product of Scott's, I fell a pris'ner t ou

Edward W. "Ned" Rosenheim, 1918-2005, a personal reminiscence

By Bob Ashenhurst

Ned Rosenheim, who died on December 5th of the year just past, had a long association with, and deep affection for, the University of Chicago and the Hyde Park community, over more than two-thirds of a century. That affection was returned doubly by his colleagues, friends and neighbors.

Obituaries describing his scholarly interests and achievements also mention Ned's love of theater and participation in community entertainment events in Hyde Park. Over the years I worked with him frequently on a variety of these, particularly on the annual musical presentations of the Revels sponsored

Ned contributed his talents freely and generously to songs and ski n other occasions, such as meetings a bene 1ts for various worthy causes. It is perhaps appropriate to end with the opening lines of a song written for the annual meeting of this Society in 1981:

How delightful to live in Hyde Park, It's Elysian, and that's categorical With its saints and its sinners,

Its Nobel Prize winners,

And also. its aspects historical-.

Although not a part of his archived scholarly publications, these works describing his university and community live on by repeated performance whenever the opportunity presents itself. Ned

Rosenheim's warmth, his wit, and his contributions in so many areas, all will be sorely missed. W

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Hyde Park Historical Society Annual Meeting, 2006

early 150 guests enjoyed the annual dinner meeting the the Hyde Park Historical Society, held February 25,2006, at the Quadrangle Club.

Presided over by host Charles Custer, attendees enjoyed an excellent chicken dinner followed by the business meeting and awards ceremony. Guest speaker Rick Kogan, feature writer for the Chicago Tribune, amused guests with tales of his life in what he genuinely feels is the greatest city in the world.

A Cornell Award was presented by Bert Benade to Cory Stutts, outstanding history teacher at the Ancona School. Ms. Stutts's students' projects at the Society's History Fair last spring were one of the high points of the year. Frances Vandervoort presented Judge Abner Mikva's Cornell Award to his daughter, Judge Mary Mikva of the Cook County Circuit Court, who

Rev. Dr. Leon Finney and Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie

Cory Stutts and Bert Benade

represented her father at the ceremony. Judge Mikva was cited for his half-century of service to his community, state, and nation, working within all three branches of government for civil rights, ethics, fair employment, and education.

Jack Spicer presented Marian and Leon Despres Preservation Awards to three agencies. The first was given to the Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church, led by Rev. Dr. Leon Finney,Jr. The second went to International House of the University of Chicago, preserved through efforts of the Save I-House Committee and the University of Chicago. The third award was given to the South Side Trust and Savings Bank, 4651 South Cottage Grove Avenue, abandoned for ten years and threatened by demolition when owners Timothy and Everett Rand welcomed Shore Bank co the site last fall. Alderman Toni

Preckwinkle's office is now located on the building's second floor. ►@

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Rick Kogan

<O The awards ceremony ended with remarks by Alderman Preckwinkle, who congratulated winners of the Cornell and Despres Awards. She also praised Rebecca Janowitz and ocher staff members of the

Do You Recognize This Building?

All of us have seen this building. Some of us may walk by it on a daily basis. This handsome building is the six story apartment building at

5129 South Harper Avenue. Marcia Adelman, who now lives in Winnetka, bought the building as a real estate investment in the mid-1970s. This almost complete water color, painted by Charles Morgan, was found in the building's lobby.

Judging from the automobiles and style, the picture was probably painted in the early 1920s. After selling the building in the mid-1990s, Ms. Adelman decided to return the painting to the community where it had spent most of the 20th Century.

After a few telephone calls and a trip to Hyde Park by Ms. Adelman, the painting is now permanently installed on the wall of the Society's headquarters. Thank you, Mrs. Adelman! -FSV

Fran Vandervoort and Judge Mary Mikva

Fourth Ward Aldermanic Office for their commitment to preserving the bank building.

People left the happy event with the sense that Hyde Park's unique history has been well served. IIliD

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Wintry Lichen Tour

In Hyde Park on February 12, half a dozen people met at the Darrow Bridge south of the Museum of Science and Industry in Jackson Park and spent nearly 2 hours checking out local lichens. About 20 species were identified on trees, bushes, rocks, fences mostly in the areas along the north and east side of the lagoon (walking through Bobolink Meadow to the golf driving range and back). Richard Hyerczyk led the group and provided his expertise for identifications.

We hope to continue with additional visits to monitor lichens in other areas of Hyde Park. Keep us posted about further activities!

- Carol & Leo Herzenberg

...

HYDE PARK LICHEN PROJECT SCHEDULE

., Rich Hyerczyk of the Morton Arboretum = continues his project to identify local lichen species. All interested residents are invited to

....._, participate. Remember to dress appropriately = and bring a hand lens. Each tour will last approximately two hours.

Looking for Lichens in Nichols Park

Nichols Park Lichen Tour

A dozen intrepid naturalists came to Nichols Park on March 19, a sunny but chilly day, for the second stage of the Hyde Park Lichen Survey. Rich Hyerczyk of the Morton Arboretum led the search of tree trunks and branches for the colorful, if cryptic organisms.

The schedule for future tours is shown below. Please note that a major tour has been scheduled for Oak Woods Cemetery Saturday morning, June 17, from 9 until 11. Lichen-eers will meet just inside the entrance to the cemetery, 1035 East 67th Street, Watch for further announcements.

May 28, 2006, Sunday

.. .. Burnham Park north of 55th Street. Meet just =

west of the Lake Shore Drive underpass at 3:00 P.M.

June 11, 2006, Sunday

Washington Park. Meet near Cottage Grove

....._, Avenue just north of the DuSable Museum at =

3:00P.M.

June 17, 2006, Saturday (note different day) Oak Woods Cemetery.1035 East 67th Street, just inside the north entrance. Tour will last from 9 until 11 A.M.

Additional dates may be set for surveys on the Midway and elsewhere. Also, there may be after-dinner tours as the days lengthen.

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S1,rlng 2006

HPHS Show and Tell a Success

The Society's first major venture into a public showing of artifacts, photographs, maps, and other memorabilia collected by members was a tremendous success. On March 25, in a sunny room in the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, members displayed their items on artfully arranged tables and entertained questions from interested visitors. Contributors to the show were as follows:

Alta Blakely

A film of the parade marking the Grand Opening of the Headquarters building, 5529 South Lake Park Avenue, October 26, 1980. The original film has been converted to DVD format. Roger Keller, who made the conversion, would welcome still photographs which could be identified and added co the DVD for a more complete visual record of the event. If you have such photographs, please contact Alta Blakely at 773- 753-4633.

Joe Marlin

• The legal seals from the Keck Bros. Architectural firm.

• A Kemper Cambi camera from 1893, about 211 x 211 x l II in size, along with descriptive information about the camera from a book on the history of photography.

Joe Marlin with legal seals from Keck Bros. and a tiny "Combi" camera from the 1893 Columbian Exposition

Roger and Kathy Huff

Maps, charts, and other documents related to the Professors' Row Houses located in the 5600 block of Kenwood Avenue. Most of the material was originally prepared for the centennial of the homes, which were constructed in 1903.

Roland Bailey

Memorabilia from various productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company, including playbills, prices, and promotional materials.

Janice Knox

• Two albums of Hyde Park and Woodlawn post cards, from her collection of historic post cards.

• Maps and memorabilia of Woodlawn.

• Assorted memorabilia from the University of Chicago.

Janice Knox and Shirley Olar

Hank Schwab

Assorted items from recent times, including brochures on ArtsFest, SECC, Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce, and University of Chicago community brochure.

Frances Vandervoort

Hyde Park Digs and Discoveries: items related to the geologic history of Hyde Park, and materials related to last year's tree survey.

Bert Benade

• 1933 Century of Progress program

• A book about the Lama Temple of Jehore, China

• Great University Memorials published by the University of Chicago Press, 1925.

• Chicago's Great South Shore, published 1930.

Steve Treffman

Degree certificate from the Old (original) University of Chicago, ca. 1880s.

• 1993 Chicago World's Fair paper parasol

• Hyde Park Centennial Vest, 1962

• Photographs from Hyde Park Centennial programs

• Photocopy of Illinois legislation creating the Town of Hyde Park in February 17, 1851.

• Photographs of Hyde Park, 1940s and '50s.

• Political and other Hyde Park-related pins.

• Aitchpe (Hyde Park High School yearbook), 1918

Steve Treffman with 1933 Century of Progress parasol

Carol Bradford

• Items from the archives of United Church of Hyde Park, including:

• Hyde Park Presbyterian Church

• Photographs of original building at 53rd &

Blackstone

• Photographs of 1889 structure (still standing) from 1930s

• Biographical material on Paul Cornell

• Photograph and biography of William Henry Ray

• Photographs of other early members of the church

• 50th Anniversary book (1910)

• Hyde Park Congregational Church (formerly at 56th

& Dorchester)

• Scrapbook including pictures of the site and of the church (now demolished), programs and directories of the church.

• Hyde Park Methodist Church (formerly at 56th &

Blackstone)

• 50th Anniversary Program book (1940)

• Blank copy of a Restrictive Covenant agreement, 1930s

• Letters related to the support of an Open Occupancy

Ordinance as introduced by Alderman Leon Despres.

• Letters related to resolving the case against pastor of the church who was arrested during a civil rights demonstration in Jackson, MS in the 1960s.

• Materials related to the church's involvement with sponsorship of Japanese citizens (who had been in Relocation Camps during WW II) to be resettled in Chicago.

• Copy of a page from Construction News, May 1914 describing houses at 5113 and 5121 S. Woodlawn Avenue.

Gary Ossewarde

• An early Cornell Award

• A community recognition plaque from a Chicago Marathon, acknowledging local winners Zeus Preckwinkle and George Davis.

Gary Ossewarde and Fran Vandervoort study a map of Hyde Park geology

A complete description of the exhibits can be accessed through the HPHS website:

http:/ Iwww.hydeparkhistory.orglshowtellcontributors.html

i ...... correction.......................................................................

In the Winter edition of Hyde Park History, the dimensions of the Lady Elgin ("Hyde Park and the Wreck of the Lady Elgin") were erroneously reported to be, " 252 feet long by 337 feet

wide " The actual dimensions were 252 feet

long and 33.7 feet wide.

This article is taken from the book, Chicago's Great South Shore, John C. Spray, editor. Chicago: South Shore Publishing Company, 1930.

Hyde Park Herald is Oldest Newspaper On Chicago's Great South Shore

The Hyde Park Herald is the oldest community newspaper on the South Side. In the issue of the 16th of September, 1884, appeared the annourtcement that "at the last meeting of the Hyde Park Trustees, the Hyde Park Herald was unanimously elected as the official paper of the village for the ensuing year."

Hopeful and ambitious were the brace of young editors, John D. Sherman and Clarence P. Dresser.

"Naturally we are pleased at this recognition of our paper, even if it is somewhat tardy," was their editorial comment.

Through the vicissitudes of fifty years the Hyde Park Herald has been a voice with a conscience in the community of Hyde Park, a true reflection of a community from which comes the source and inspiration of many of the reform movements that have helped to ventilate the sink of civic corruption in Chicago. Although the office quarters of the Hyde Park Herald at 5427 Lake Park Avenue are only a block away from its headquarters of fifty years ago on Fifty-third Street near Lake Park Avenue, the wide open spaces of a village community have been

changed to the crowded streets of a highly urbanized community.

And, though today, Hyde Park is vastly shrunk in point of territory, it is greatly enlarged in point of population. Politically it is the fourth and fifth wards and part of the third; geographically, it is that territory lying east of Cottage Grove Avenue, between Sixtieth Street and Thirty-third Street; it is an exclusively white territory with a population of 75,000 people. It possesses three distinct sections: the hotel group, comprising one of the major hotel communities of the Middle West; the Kenwood residential section still presenting some of the most beautiful homes to be seen in Chicago, and the University of Chicago community which again is unique.

There is a great difference between the Hyde Park Herald of fifty years ago and today. Whereas it then reflected village feeling, it today is the most powerful

Spencer Castle, Editor-Owner, Hyde Park Herald

instrument for building up community feeling in the midst of a great and growing city.

For the first two or three years of its existence, the Hyde Park Herald came out in a form very similar to its present dress, a sheet of four columns, twelve inches in length. Then, in 1885, as if in imitation of the dailies, for it had no technical reason, as they had, to increase its page size, it lengthened its pages to twenty inches and its width to six columns. This seemed to have been the typical dress of the Hyde Park Herald until its purchase in February, 1927, by the present Editor-Owner.

He resumed immediately the early form which it has kept ever since as more suitable to the needs of a commun1ty paper.

Today, the Hyde Park Herald comes out every

Friday, and has never missed an issue in more than fifteen years. The very first editor, J. B. Sherman of

Winnetka, is still living; during the World War, the paper was owned and edited by R. B. Smart and Miss

V. B. Morris, now living at 5635 Drexel Avenue; from 1920-1926, Maurice Vittu or 5431 Lake Park Avenue was the publisher; from 1926-1927, Mrs. Nonie Vittu was the publisher; from 1924-1927, Mr. F. A. Churchill was its able editor; since 1927 Spencer

Castle has been the Editor-Owner. W

s,,rtng 2 0 0 6

Claude Weil loves Chicago and, in his words, has explored it ''from end to end." As a history buff, he is fascinated by language and names wherever they appear. He offers the following list of the origin of local street names taken from Streetwise Chicago, by Hayner and McNamee, Loyola University Press, 1988.

Street Names

FORRESTVILLE AVENUE

(532 E. from 4300 S. to 13452 S.)

Forrestville was a hamlet on the South Side in the 1850s near what is now Hyde Park. This street runs through the village.

GREENWOOD AVENUE

(1100 E. from 4212 S. to 13300 S.)

This avenue was named either for Mississippi's Choctaw Indian Chief Greenwood LeFlore (1800- 1865) or for William M. Greenwood, a lawyer and Chicago real estate developer in the 1840s.

INGLESIDE AVENUE (930 E. from 4700 S. to 13520 S.)

Named for Ingleside, Illinois, located north of Chicago near Fox Lake. Ingleside was a popular summer resort for Chicagoans in the nineteenth century.

KINGSTON AVENUE (2524 E. from 7300 S. to 9356 S.)

Paul Cornell, the founder of Hyde Park and other Chicago communities was born in the state of New York and named this street for Kingston, NY (Note: Claude Weil lived in Kingston, New York, in 1942 before coming to Chicago.)

OGLESBY AVENUE (2332 E. from 6700 S. to 13758 S.)

Richard]. Oglesby (1824-1899) was a soldier in the Mexican-American War, a U.S. senator from Illinois, and governor of Illinois from 1865 to 1869 and again from 1885 to 1889. During his term as senator, Illinois ratified the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution and repealed its racially discriminatory "Black Laws."

PAYNE DRIVE (800 E. in Washington Park)

John Barton Payne, born in 1855 in Virginia, moved to Chicago in 1883 and practiced law. He was president of the South Park District in 1922.

HPHS Spring Events Schedule

• Saturday, April 29, 2006, 2-4 P.M. Tom Heinz will sign his new book, The Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide, from 2 to 4 at the HPHS Headquarters.

• Saturday, May 20, 2006, 2-4 P.M. DePaul and Jackson Park Exhibit, HPHS Headquarters.

• Sunday, May 28, 2006, 3-5 P.M. Burnham Park Lichen Survey. Meet just west of the Lake Shore Drive Underpass at 3 PM.

• Sunday, June 11, 2006, 3-5 P.M. Washington Park Lichen Survey. Meet west of Cottage Grove Avenue just north of the DuSable Museum.

• Saturday, June 17, 2006, 9-11 P.M. Oak Woods Cemetery lichen tour. Meet inside the north gate, 1035 East 67th Street.

• Sunday, June 17, 2006, 2-4 P.M. Peter Ascoli will sign copies of a biography of his grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, at a site to be determined.

S1,rlng 2006

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Chicago's Finest Transportation The Illinois Central Electric

Chicago lake front and ICRR tracks, from Randolph Street looking south in the early 1860s.

This artide is the first of a series about the history of the Illinois Central Railroad.

By John G. Allen and Roy G. Benedict

he South Side's great electric railroad celebrates its eightieth anniversary in 2006. Mecra Electric--or as many long-time residents still chink of it, the

Illinois Central-is a solid, imposing presence in Hyde Park and the other South Side neighborhoods it traverses. With its raised embankment and its latticed steel towers, it has a solid, almost timeless feel co it.

Like the Gothic buildings of the University of Chicago or Hyde Park's tree-lined streets with their mansions,

coachhouses, townhouses, and six-flats, the railroad is an integral and evocative part of neighborhood life.

This great piece of transportation infrastructure has no parallel elsewhere in Chicagoland. It has few peers in North America, or indeed in the world. Even as Metra Electric celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2006, it remains, in its design and physical plant, at the pinnacle of achievement in the nation's railroad capital.

Public transportation on Chicago's South Side and south suburbs cook a great stride forward in 1926 when the Illinois Central Railroad (IC) completed electrification of its commuter service. To this day, the physical plant of what is now Metra Electric reflects the vision of an age when the railroads were confident ►8

-<@ of themselves and the future. Much of that optimism is still palpable in the confidence with which the railroad strides authoritatively across Chicago's South Side. But the Illinois Central Electric story starts seven decades before the start of electric service, when Chicago was eagerly embracing the emerging technology of railroading as it outgrew its earlier role as a frontier outpost.

Paul Cornell and the Route of the Illinois Central

How did this great electric railroad come robe, and what makes it special even to this day? The res electrification came about largely because the railroad ran along the south lakefront between the Loop and Hyde Park. When the IC's route was being planned in the early 1850s, the railroad sought to reach the Chicago River on a more westerly alignment near Halsted St., which would have bypassed Hyde Park altogether. But the City of Chicago insisted on a lakefront alignment. In an age long before Grant Park, Burnham Park, and Lake Shore Drive turned the south lakefront into a well-manicured landscape, the city's logic was that a lakefront route would force the railroad to protect the Loop and the south lakefront from storms and erosion to safeguard its own investment.

This forced the railroad to deal with developer Paul Cornell, owner of today's Hyde Park. Cornell insisted that the railroad run what was then called suburban service to Hyde Park "in due course" (although the

agreement did not specify a date), and buy lots in the community in order to have a stake in its success. The re reached Chicago in 1854, and inaugurated a four round-trip suburban schedule on July 21, 1856, making it the first commuter service west of Philadelphia. In the wake of the Panic of 185 7, the railroad showed that it, too, could drive a hard bargain, and insisted that Cornell reimburse the railroad for part of its losses from the service.

The IC was considering getting out of the

commuter business altogether, but as Cornell was helping to pay the commuter deficit, the railroad felt optimistic enough about the service's prospects to extend service from Hyde Park to Woodlawn (i.e., from 51st St. - roday's East Hyde Park Boulevard - to 63rd St.) in 1858. At some point between 1862 and 1869, the IC extended service half a mile further to Oak Woods Cemetery at 67th St.

In subsequent decades, the IC would lead Chicago's railroads in the use of specialized cars and locomotives for its suburban service. Initially, however, the railroad used cars and engines from its regular f1eet. Although the IC would evenrnally become a major consumer of coal from southern Illinois, its first locomotives burned wood, and refueled at a "wood pile" near where 57th St. is today.

The Fire and the Fair

It took the 1871 Chicago Fire to turn the IC into an important part of the Chicago transportation picture. Many of those displaced by the fire relocated to the South Side, which was largely untouched by the fire. In 1871, shortly before the fire, the re extended service a short distance to Parkside (at 70th St. and Kimbark Ave.). In 1872, after the fire, the IC took the bold step of running commuter trains all the way to Riverdale, just beyond the large area of Hyde Park rownship-which beca e pare of the city in 1889.

In 1873 the JC inaugurated Sunday service, both for South Sid rs who still attended church services downtown, and for excursionists traveling to Oak Woods Cemetery (Americans in the 19th century had a closer relationship with death and the deceased than we do today). The South Chicago and Blue Island branches opened for service in 1883 and 1892, respectively. On the main line, further extensions brought IC commuter service to Harvey in 1890, Flossmoor in 1900, and Matteson in 1912. There were further south suburban extensions tO Richton (now Richton Park) in 1946 and Park Forest South (now University Park) in 1979.

The IC provided impressive brick and srone stations and ornate ones with Carpenter Gothic architecture for its commuters. Adler and Sullivan designed a

lepot at Oakland (39th St.) with arches comparable to those found at Kenilworth on the Chicago & North Western or Stone Ave. on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. There was a large brick depot with a mansard roof at South Park station (57th St.), an engraving of which appeared on the cover of the first issue of Hyde Park History in 1980. Wooden depots, many with Carpenter Gothic trim, served commuters at other locations, particularly along the Somh Chicago branch. With the exceptions of Homewood and Flossmoor, the railroad demolished all of these station buildings in preparation for electrification.

Had it not been for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the IC might well have remained a commuter railroad much like the Burlington, the Rock Island, the Chicago & North Western, or the Milwaukee Road. But the World's Fair propelled the Illinois Central to the forefront of Chicago's commuter railroads. The selection of the Jackson Park site was influenced in part by its proximity to the railroad for fast, easy access by fairgoers, and the IC fully rose to the challenge of handling unprecedented levels of ridership.

Io 1892, in preparation for the World's Fair, the IC raised its tracks through Hyde Park and Woodlawn onto their present embankrnent so as to prevent delays and accidents at the many grade crossings with local streets. The decorative concrete balustrades where the railroad crosses local streets came later; they are part

of the "new" Hyde Park bridges, which replaced lower steel structures in the decade before electrification.

Grade separation work affected the main line only; the South Chicago and Blue Island branches remain on their original street-level alignments to this day.

In addition to its already-frequent service, the IC ran special trains to and from the fair-and there were so many of these trains that the railroad built a new set of express cracks for the benefit of fairgoers. "Peak travel day to the Fair was October 9, 1893...

Counting passengers carried tO and from the Fair and its regular suburban customers carried that day, the IC handied 541,312 people. The IC may still hoid the record for passengers moved in one day on a U.S. suburban railroad." After the Fair, commuters benefited from the express tracks.

Even before the World's Fair, IC service to Hyde Park was already distinct from most other commuter railroads. The IC was Chicago's busiest commuter railroad, the trains had their own separate tracks since 1880, and they used specially-designed steam locomotives that could operate in either direction with equal ease. This saved on the land, time, and effort needed to tum the engines around on a turntable or a wye track at the end of the run, and made it more economical to run frequent trains back and forth over relatively short distances. The World's Fair specials stopped exclusively at high-level platforms, so that passengers could board and alight without climbing or descending steps in the trains' vestibules. The IC subsequently extended high-level platforms to all of its South Side and south suburban commuter stations.

Although routine on rapid transit systems like Chicago's "L", high platforms were unusual on commuter railroads

and remain so to this day outside the New York area.

The Decision to Electrify

By 1920, there were about 400 commuter, intercity passenger, and freight trains passing through Hyde Park on the IC every weekday, all powered by coal-

burning steam locomotives. Most, although by no means all of these were commuter trains. The smoke from these trains led civic groups and the city to press the IC to electrify its operations. In 1919 the IC entered into a sec of agreements, collectively known as the Lake Front Ordinance, with the City and the South Park Commission (subsequently merged into

World's Fair crowd and train at Van Buren Station, Chicago, 1893.

tbe Chicago Park District). These agreements clarified certain property ownership matters for the railroad, and committed the parties to a series of civic improvements-the most important of which was electrification of the IC's commuter service. The Lake Front Ordinance committed the IC to a strict 21-year timetable: suburban service had to be electrified by 1927, freight service north of Roosevelt Road by 1930, freight service south of Roosevelt Road by 1935, and through passenger service within the City of Chicago by 1940.

As it turned out, only the suburban electrification

and the electrification of the freight service ... [to} a n w yard at 31st Street were ... completed. [ ... ]The Depression and the development of the diesel-electric

... locomotive doomed the freight electrification program, and the passenger electrification was contingent on ... [a} proposed new lakefront terminal, which was never built.

A Risk-Averse Choice of Voltage

Every railroad electrifying its service faced a major decision from the outset: direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). In a DC system, electricity flows in one direction from the source through the crain's motors tO a "ground" through the running rails. In an AC system, the directional flow of the electricity pulses back and forth at many cycles per second. At the end of World War I, DC was seen as a conservative ►0

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Corrections

In the article, "Chicago's Finest Transportation: The Illinois Central Electric," by John G. Allen and Roy G. Benedict, the following references were inadvertently omitted:

1. On Page 3, Col. 1, Par. 3. The passage, "Peak travel day ... on a U.S. suburban railroad," is from: Alan R. Lind, From the I.Akes to the Gulf: The Illinois Central Story. Park Forest, Illinois: Transport History Press, 1993, p. 55.

2. On P. 3, Col. 2, Pars. 1 and 2, the section, "a strict 21-year timetable ... which was never built," is from: Alan R. Llnd, Limiteds Along the Lakefront: The Illinois Central in Chicago. Park Forest, Illinois: Transport History Press, 1986, P. 57.

@ choice rather than an innovative one. DC systems involved a lower voltage (pressure of transmission) than AC systems, which meant that more electricity had to be produced to do the same work. Furthermore, DC was not as well suited as AC to hauling heavy freight trains. On the other hand, with the electric technology of the day, cars and locomotives drawing AC power had co carry heavy transformers on board co reduce the voltage from the overhead wires co a level low enough for use in the traction motors. The weight of these transformers made AC less clearly advantageous on an electrification intended primarily for commuter

service, as opposed to heavy-haul freight service where AC was more often seen as the superior choice.

When the IC made the decision to electrify in 1919, AC was being used successfully on the New Haven Line and on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Certain operating issues with AC technology, however, were still several years away from resolution. The alternating-current systems that the New Haven line and the Pennsylvania Railroad chose were selected largely for their ability to power heavy freight trains. Commuter rail service (although important) was not the determining factor as it was with the IC, so it is not surprising that the IC and certain other railroads chose direct current in order to avoid some of the technological complications then associated with AC.

Another factor probably influencing the choice of current was the extent of the electrifications that the various railroads planned. The Illinois Central and Canadian Northern never planned to extend electrifi cation beyond their commuter territories, and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western's plan for electrifi cation beyond its commuter district into the Pocono Mountains was tentative at best. For most electrifications intended mainly for commuter rail, the advantages of

AC were more than offset by other factors. Cliil

Paul Stanford, "Electric Commuting and a Cleaner Hyde Park." Hyde Park Historical Society No. 1. Chicago: Hyde Park Historical Society, 1980, pp. 14-16.

Carlton J. Corliss, Main Line of Mid-America: The Story of the Illinois Central. New York: Creative Age Press, 1950.

"Chicago Time-Table of 1869." Illinois Central Magazine, June 1930.

Roy Benedict, "Shop Track," First & Fastest, Autumn 2002, p. 18.

Alan R. Lind, Limiteds Along the Lakefront: The Illinois Central in Chicago. Park Forest, IL: Transport History Press, 1986, p. 55.

Alan R. Lind, Limiteds Along the Lakefront: The Illinois Central in Chicago. Park Forest, IL: Transport History Press, 1986, p. 57.

Michael Bezilla, Electric Traction on the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1895-1968, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980, pp. 68-72.

Rich Hyerczyk identifies lichens in Washington Park

Lichen Tours Conclude

Hyde Park lichen enthusiasts finished the survey of these lovely but little known features of local biology with a tour of Oak Woods Cemetery on Saturday morning, June 17. lichen specialist Rich Hyerczyk of Morton Arboretum was indefatigable as usual, providing complex but acoustically pleasing names for patches of color on tree trunks, walls, and grave markers.

The previous Sunday, Rich led a cour of Washington Park. Licheneers, who met at the small courtyard just north of the DuSable Museum near Cottage Grove Avenue, found 16 species of lichens right ther , on the wooden benches and cement pavement. Heading west into adjacent parts of Washington Park, the group visited the lagoon and spring that feeds it, ob erving trees, looking for wildlife, and of course, lichens. Rich climbed a tree for a closer look at lichens in this part of the park, almost all of which grew on the bark of various trees.

In early May lichen enthusiasts toured Burnham Park, finding new species on the rocks of Promontory Point, park benches, and tree trunks.

Solving the Mystery.

The mysterious object on the cover of the Spring Newsletter was a crustose lichen, one of two basic forms of lichens found in Hyde Park. Foliose lichens have a more leaf-like appearance.

Historic Jackson Park Program a Success

On Saturday, May 27, 2000 HPHS Board members Douglas Anderson and Steve Treffman spoke to a fascinated audience about Jackson Park during its early years. Steve presented a collection of cyanotype photographs from 1892-1893, including one showing the Hyde Park Hotel, built in 1888 by Paul Cornell. The hotel, which stood at the southwest corner of Lake

Doug Anderson and Steve Treffmantalk about Historic Jackson Park

Park Avenue and 51st Street, was demolished in the early 1970s as a part of Hyde Park's urban renewal plan. Other photographs showed various views of 51st, 53rd, 55th, and 59th Streets.

Doug told the story of Jackson Park from its inception in 1969, as part of Chicago's plan for a South Park, through its construction under the direction of landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Doug described the filling in of lagoons and marshes to construct boat launches and a reflecting pool. Olmsted had hoped for a

Venetian canal, but after the disastrous fire of October, 1871, Chicago had no funds avai Iable for the frivolities of a major park.

In 1889, Chicago vied with New York City to be selected as the site for the World's Columbian Exposition, a great fair to celebrate the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. New Yorkers, believing their city a shoo-in for the prestigious fair, were stunned when Chicago, a "crime ridden backwater stinking of wild onions and stockyards" was chosen.

Doug described the extraordinary measures taken by

Olmsted and Daniel Burnham, chief of construction, to convert the swales and sand ridges into land stable

enough to support some of the largest buildings ever constructed by man. 200,000 cubic yards of imported topsoil were enriched by tons of manure from the stockyards, and then spread about by thousands of horses brought in specifically for fair construction.

100,000 willow trees were planted, and lagoon banks were shored up to construct waterways for rowboats. The White City, as the great fair was called, soon became the stuff of legend, a legend that continues today in such best-selling books as The Devil in White City, by Erik Larsen (Vintage Books, 2004).

Steve and Doug's photographs now adorn the walls of HPHS headquarters, and can be seen on Saturday afternoons throughout the summer. FSV

CorneI I and Despres Awards Coming Up

It's not too soon to consider making recommend ations for the upcoming Paul Cornell Awards and Marion and Leon Despres Preservation Awards.

Cornell awards recognize individuals and organizations whose work exemplifies the values, objectives, and heritage of the Society, including education and preserving Hyde Park's documents and artifacts. Despres Awards are given for outstanding achievements in the preservation of Hyde Park's architectural heritage.

Previous winners include, for the Cornell Award, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, International house, and Stephanie and George Franklin for restoring Nichols Park. Despres winners include Marion and Leon Despres, International House, and the Metropolitan Apostolic Church.

Nomination forms are now available in the HPHS headquarters at 5529 South Lake Park Avenue.

1................... PHOTOGRAPHY EX H I B IT 1

1-JyJe Park on lhe Cusp

of Change, 1892-1893

SUMMER 2006

The construction of the Columbian World's Fair of 1893 dramatically facilitated the transformation of Hyde Park from suburban haven to urban community. Our current summer long exhibit displays views of Hyde Park,Jackson Park and the Fair just as that change began.

·.............................................................................................................................·

Students Honored at History Fair

Book about Earl Dickerson now available

In May, HPHS President Carol Bradford awarded three students who participated in the Chicago Metro History Fair with checks for the best project relating to Hyde Park Township History. The students, Catie Anderson, David Badesch, and Jeremy Custer produced a documentary, Taking a Stand for

Integration: Trumbull Park Homes. They expressed a willingness to make a copy of their documentary DVD for the Society's headquarters.

A highlight of the program was

At last the book, Earl B. Dickerson: A Voice for Freedom and Equality, by Robert Blakely with Marcus Shepard, has been published and the Hyde Park Historical Society can take some credit.

The book began as an oral history by Robert Blakely who was captivated by Dickerson in a two-hour conversation he had with him and became determined to write a book about him. It was finished, but un published when Blakely died, and was ushered through an incredible maze of complications toward publication by his widow, HPHS Board member Alta Blakely.

Northwestern University Press has published the book as part of the series "Chicago Lives", which includes the recent memoirs of Len Despres, Truman

Gibson and Timuel Black. It is hardbound and quite beautiful.

Dickerson, a truly monumental figure, was nearly forgotten

HPHS President Caroi Bradford presents checksto Chicago MetroHistory Fair participants David Badesch and Catie Anderson. Co-winner Jeremy Custer is not in the photograph.

the presentation of the Despres Prize for Political History. Len Despres was

during the militant 1960's. This

is his first biography but should not be the last. Hyde Park Historical Society members might cake a tiny bit of pride in

present and personally autographecf copies of his new book, which were given to these students and other prizewinners. Angell Campbell, a first-year teacher at the Hyde Park Career Academy, received the Arthur Andersen Rookie Teacher Award for new teachers who encourage their students to participate in the Fair.

The Society hopes to hold a showing of students' projects about Hyde Park at a future date. FSV

th·erace that they were there, or

somewhere near, at its inception. At the May meeting of the

Board of the Hyde Park Historical Society, Alta Blakely presented the Board with a copy

a. Alta Blakely withEarl B. of the book. Mr. Blakely, who

Dickerson book, written passed away in 1994, left a

by her husband, Robert completed manuscript about

Blakely Mr. Dickerson. Since then, Alta heroically devoted a large portion of her life to finding a publisher for that manuscript. Her efforts were crowned with a success that honors Mr. Dickerson and Mr. Blakely and certainly her own efforts. Alta has been a long-time loyal and productive member of our Society and irs Board and she now honors us with this gift.

The inscription she wrote in the book she gave to the Society reads:

To the Hyde Park Historical Society - See what you have wrought! 1983-2006 (Signed) Alta Blakely

Jay Mulberry and Steve Treffman contributed to chis article.

Note: The Szmzme11 2005 edition of Hyde Park History contains a synopsis of this book.

Peter Ascoli talks about Julius Rosenwald

By Carol Bradford

Nearly 50 people filled the HPHS headquarters on June 17 co hear Peter Ascoli talk about his grandfather, the noted businessman and philanthropist, Julius Rosenwald. For the local audience, he focused on Rosenwald's Hyde Park activities. He was born in Springfield, IL co German Jewish parents. As a young man, he got into the men's clothing business, which led to an eventual meeting with Richard Sears. When, in the 1890s, Mr. Roebuck wanted out of the Sears

Roebuck Company, Rosenwald bought a one-quarter interest for $37,500. Under his guidance and leadership, the company grew dramatically. A key co its·success was the development of an efficient distribution system, operated out of the company's west side headquarters at Arthingcon and Homan Avenues. Rosenwald initiated the construction of that campus, most of which still stands today. The original Sears Tower at 900 S. Homan, is a 14-story structure with an Italianate crown. (It is currently being marketed by its investor owners for redevelopment as office or residential condominiums.) Concern for company employees was another factor in the success of the company. The campus included a library, YMCA, and dining room. He was among the first co institute profit-sharing for all employees.

Rosenwald's charitable giving began about 1900, influenced by Rabbi Emil Hirsch of Sinai Congregation. Among the first recipients were Michael Reese Hospital, various Jewish charities, and the University of Chicago, which was less than 20 years old at the time. In particular, he funded the Department of

Geography and Geology, including the hall which bears his name. According co Ascoli, Rosenwald didn't want anything co be named for him, but the University slipped this one in while he was traveling abroad, and upon his return it was coo late to change it. He was instrumental in bringing the School of Civics and Philanthropy into the University, where it was then named the School of Social Service Administration. He made a lead gift of $500,000 co establish the University's medical school, and induced friends, such as Mr. Eckhart to also support the university. He also contributed 40% of the cost of building Burton-) udson Courts.

Among his best known efforts is the Museum of Science and Industry. He first got the idea for such a museum when he visited a famous German museum. He engaged in long and complex negotiations with the South Park Commissioners, the state legislature, and city officials, among others. All cold, the Rosenwald family gave $11 million for the establishment of the MSI. The first portions of the

museum opened in 1933, one year after his death. Rosenwald first met Booker T. Washington in 1911,

when Washington invited him co visit Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He felt that the two had a similar philosophy of hard work and group effort to advance opportunities for those outside the "mainstream" of society at the time. Initially, Rosenwald contributed to Tuskegee Institute itself, and ocher private schools for African Americans. But when Washington pointed out the extreme lack of educational resources for African Americans in the rural areas of southern states at the time, he began to give money for the construction of public schools throughout the region. These are known as Rosenwald Schools. By the time of his death in 1932, this collaboration had resulted in the construction of 5,357 schools and other institutions for African-

Peter Ascoli signs books about his grandfather, Julius Rosenwald

Americans in 15 southern states. Many of the Rosenwald Schools are now on the watch list of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Some are already being restored and put co a variety of public uses.

Other philanthropic activities in Chicago for African Americans included the Michigan Boulevard Gardens apartment complex (commonly known at the Rosenwald Apartments) at 47th Street and Michigan Avenue; and the recently refurbished Wabash YMCA, built in 1913. The latter was just one of many YMCAs for African Americans which he funded throughout the country.

Over the years, Rosenwald relied on various people to advise him on his giving. In addition to Rabbi Hirsch, among the most noted were Jane Addams, Judge Julian W. Mack, and Booker T. Washington. During his time, be was on the cutting edge of progressive philanthropy, with other interests including making health care affordable, and giving mini-grants co artists and small business people. Among the latter recipients were Ralph Ellison (while writing The Invisible Man), Marian Anderson, Ralph Bunche, and many others. He established a charitable fund, with the stipulation that all assets be distributed within 25 years of his death. When the fund ended, he and his

estate had given away $63 million. Ciiil

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Station Stop: Reform School

By Claude Weil

43rd Street ICRR station seen from the west. This was the site of the original Reform School Station.

Greenwood Avenue.

In its annual report to the Board of Supervisors of

ooking at an 1871 Illinois Central Railroad train schedule, Reform School was a station located between the 47th Street-Kenwood stop and the

39th Street-Oakland stop. So where was this Reform School located? It is shown on an 1861 map of Cook County in an area then called Forestville, just south of Cleaverville. The original holdings of Charles Cleaver, an Englishman who came to Chicago in 1833 extended from 37th to 39th St. but later seem to have extended as far south as 41st Street. The Reform School also appears on the Blanchard Guide Map of 1868.

Although no street names are given on the map, the location of the school was on the north side of 43rd Street near where Lake Park Avenue intersects with

Cook County for the year ending November 30, 1857, the building in which the school was located is referred to as the "old poor house." This poorhouse or almshouse (a concept which originated in England in the 10th century to provide a place of residence for poor, old and distressed folk) was built about 1841 at a cost of $700 borrowed from an E.R. Bowen. There is a Bowen Street in the area at about 4100 south though it's not clear whether he was the Bowen for whom it was named. The 160-acre tract on which the poorhouse was built extended from Cottage Grove Avenue to the Lake and from 40th (then or somewhat later called Clinton Street) to 43rd street. In 1855, the Cook County Almshouse was moved to Dunning in ►

-<O Jefferson Township in northwest Chicago. So the building fell vacant. It was then leased to the City of Chicago though apparently, a formal lease was never signed.

Before the school was opened, boys who could not come up with bail money were lodged in the Bridewell*, among older, more hardened criminals. It was in protest to that practice, that the school was opened.

An article in the Chicago Tribune dated August 20, 1856 and titled "CHICAGO REFORM SCHOOL"

went as follows:

"We last week visited this school and desire to call it to the attention of our readers. As you must know it was commenced about a year ago, having arisen out of the Missionary efforts of the Rev. D.B. Nichols, who felt convinced that, if assisted, he could rescue many of our city youthful thieves from ultimate ruin. The old county buildings, a little south of Cleaverville, were placed at his service, city funds appropriated, and the young thieves, who otherwise would have been sent to (the) Bridewell, consigned to his care. The site on which the buildings stand is admirable, fronting on the Lake and commanding a fine view, but the buildings themselves are execrable, scarcely fit for cattle. By almost superhuman labor, barrels of whitewash, soap and water which it took Cleaver's factory and the lake to supply, there has been a great cleansing and they are now tolerable. The grounds are beautifully laid out with young trees and evergreens,-and-in hort tim should the county be disposed to sell the property, the improvements, all the result of the labor of the boys, would almost pay the whole expense of the institution.

Having based our expectations, as to the condition of the boys, upon their past training, we were not a little surprised at what we saw. They are under a high degree of discipline, having stated hours throughout the whole day for domestic duty, school exercises, and out door labor. Mr. Nichols seems to act on two leading principles with the boys, submission to authority and self-reliance. The first is inflexibly insisted on, and the whole labor of the institution, cooking, washing, cleaning, tailoring, and, in short, everything is performed by the boys themselves. Each dormitory is cleansed

*The term "Bridewell" originated in England when, in the early 16th centttry, Cardinal Wolsey had built a palace for Henry VIII near the well of Saint Bride (or Bridget)

which King Edward VI later turned over to the City of London for 11,se as a place for training homeless apprentices. Later it was used to house political and religiom prisoners, vagrants, and prostitutes (Encyclopedia Britannica). Most recently, the term Bridewell has become synonymom with police stations and detention facilities, mttally for minor offenses, especially in Britain, Ireland, and Canada (Wikipedia). One only can speculate why the term fell into common usage in Chicago.

each day and the whitewashing operation is perpetual. Besides six hours strictly daily, the boys are passed through all the necessary training to become domestic servants, gardeners, cooks, tailors, joiners, in short by the time a boy has been one year in the institution, he will have acquired almost as much self-reliance as an old soldier. We were especially pleased with the efforts to call forth in the boys a love of nature and the fine arts, etc. nearly every bedroom has the nucleus of a mineral cabinet, picked up from the lake shore and the walls of many were covered over with pictorials of every description. Most of the boys know something of Geology, of which science they are very fond.

We are glad to learn that new buildings are to be erected-and here we would suggest, that the boys with some help might erect the whole of the new establishment by constructing it entirely of sand, gravel and lime. Except the latter all the material is on the ground. One hundred dollars worth of lime with labor and a little lumber would build both the outside and inside walls. What are now called 'grout bondes' are now a fixed fact, and we suggest to Mr. Nichols and the board of management the consideration of the subject. If accomplished the new-institution would be a noble movement (sic) of the effects of moral training on the worst class of juvenile society.

Mr. Nichols is much in want of books, clothing, periodicals, pictorials, and is short of everything that would b useful to encourage-the bey , nd-we wot1l-<l - earnestly solicit that all who have such articles will forward them for the school to Mr. Walls store, Metropolitan block. Very few of the benevolent people in the city have any idea of the good work that is going on at this place. We invite them at once to visit it. The Hyde Park and Cleaverville train leaves the city at 6, 8, 12, 3 and 6 o'clock; any train will stop at the station and let down and take up visitors and, as they remain in Hyde Park one hour, it will not be ...more than one hour and twenty minutes, to travel there, spend a full hour in the institution and be back again in the city."

The majority of boys were thirteen or fourteen, though over the years the Reform School was in operation, there had been one or more as young as 6 and as old as 20. Most had been committed for petty larceny, however that was then defined, followed by vagrancy and homelessness.

"Incorregible" (sic) was another reason for admission

but use of that term declined over the years. Most were American but many were categorized as Irish and German. Many had lost one or both parents, or the parents may have been drunkards. The boys' daily schedule commenced at 5:30 a.m. and concluded at 7:30 p.m. It included 6 hours of work in the various shops operated by the school among which were carpentry, shoe, basketry, chairs, garden, and tailor shops. Three and a half hours were spent in class

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encompassing arithmetic, English, history and geography. Meals were short. Lunch, lasting half an hour, was the biggest meal and included meat, vegetables, and potatoes. Breakfast consisted of bread and coffee; supper of potatoes and gravy, or corn bread and syrup or mush and milk. If, today, bread and coffee seems a very spare regimen, it was apparently acceptable standard fare for Union Civil War soldiers for both breakfast and supper as described in the memoirs of Private Alfred Bellard, Gone for a Soldier.

Devotions were part of each day's schedule. The boys lived in dormitories with up to 35 in each one.

On October 13, 1856, the Chicago Dailyjo11rnt1l reported, "We regret to learn that the Reform School, in the southern portion of the city, was burned to the

Reformatory. Which left 35 "hopeless" ones remaining. It's not clear what the term hopeless meant and what happened to chem. Of the 1284 boys handled over the years of its existence, the recidivist rate was about 10%.

Just prior co its closing, a Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors of Cook County was charged with reviewing the way that the land was being used. Its report presented to the Board on March 9, 1871, describes the area as consisting of four blocks of land 2,163 feet long and 356 feet wide. The blocks extended, respectively, from the lake to Lake Avenue (not Lake Park then), from Lake to Ellis, from Ellis to Drexel and from Drexel to Cottage Grove. As it stated, the laying of sewers had helped drain the land thereby substantially increasing its value. No buildings other

than the Reform School, which stood

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on block 2, occupied the area. The report recommended selling at least some of the land. It also recommended setting aside the west part of block 4, immediately east of Cottage Grove, for

a hospital. It suggested the

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Polytechnic School co be called the Richardson College of Mining and the Practical Sciences for which a "free gift of $250,000" consisting of improved New York real estate had been made by an Englishman of that name.

Captain Richardson's bequest refers to a Lake Forest University whose charter permitted the building of its professional departments in Chicago. Finally it mentioned that a Professor McChesney had already bought

, - 11 • · J

The Reform School grounds are at the lower right.

ground at noon on Saturday. The fire broke ouc while the boys were at dinner and in a very short time was entirely consumed (sic). There were nearly 100 lads confined there. Temporary quarters for the boys have

100,000 geological and mineralogical specimens for the College. His bequest suggests that Richardson became rich

from the California Gold Rush.

The report concluded with a short laudatory statement about the work of the Reform School but made no suggestions as to its continuance. IIliD

been provided at the Bridewell. The loss is estimated at

about $800 including furniture, provisions, books, etc. The fire is supposed to have taken from the sparks of a passing locomotive." The boys were later moved into Cleaver's old soap making and rendering house located around 39th Street (nee Egandale) by the LC. tracks. By 1859, a new edifice appears to have been built at the former site. Annual reports to the Board of Supervisors written by the School's director extend to 1872.

The school was closed per a resolution passed by the Board of Governors on March 15, 1872. Most of the roughly 200 boys were turned over to relatives. Some just wandered away. On May 21 of that year, 15 boys were transferred to the newly opened Pontiac

References:

Alfred Bellard, Gone for a Soldier: The Civil War Memories of Private Alfred Bellard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).

James Brown, History of Public Assistance in Chicago, 1833-1893

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941).

Chicago Daily Journal, October 13, 1856.

"Chicago Reform School," Chicago Tribune, August 20, 1856.

Ann Durkin, J. A. Grossman, and Ann Keating, eds., Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Robert A. Holland, Chicago in Maps (New York: Rizzoli Press, 2005). Alan R. Lind, Chicago Swface Lines: An Illustrated History. (Park

Forest, Illinois: Transport History Press, 1974-1979), p. 270.

Wikipedia: Wikipedia.com

A u f 11 Ill ll 2 0 0 6

Promontory Point Progress Report

On August 14 the Chicago Park District finally agreed to the preservation review process chat the Community Task Force for Promontory Point has been fighting for for over five years. This agreement is the result of work by a coalition of

political, community, and preservation groups, including Senator Barack

preservation and repair at the Point-but the fight is not over. We must remain deeply involved and diligently watchful until the lase limestone block is replaced.

The document, "Scope of Work for Preservation of Promontory Point," is available from

www.sa vethepoinc.org.

Community Task Force for Promontory Point

Obama, Congressman

]esse ]ackson, Jr., Alderman Leslie Hairston, the Army Corps of Engineers Office of Preservation Expertise, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago, the Hyde Park Historical Society, and the Community Task Force for Promontory Point. This group has been working together for the last five months to draft a.process

designed co ensure "che most preservation possible" at the Point. With the good faith participation of all parties this review process will lead us to the preservation of the historic and beloved park known as Promontory Point. This is very good news for all who have worked during the past five years to Save Promontory Point-none of chis could have happened without the persistence of the Hyde Park/Kenwood community.

The "preservation review"

will begin when funds are appropriated by Congress and will last about one year. With the completion of the review the basics of design and construction of a preserved Point will have been established. This preservation review will mark the beginning, at long last, of the real work of

chlcago park district

Admini5trmion

541 North F,irbanlu Chici o, !Uinoi> 6061 l 1 (312) "'42-l'lA\

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Board of Commi ioners

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come out and pllY

August 14, 2005

KenBennett, 11\inois State Director

Senator Barack Obama . . John C. Kluczynski Federal Bmldmg 230 S. Dearborn, Suite 3900

Chicago, lL 60604

Dear Mr. Bennett,

"Seoe of Work for the Preservation of

I ha e reviewed the 8/14/06dra_ft Spl 1·, c11·1cago IL" proposed to be

. h hicago 1ore 1m::, , .

Promontory Pomt a ongt e fE . ers The Park District is open to A y Corps o ngme • . n/

conducted by the • • rm "d th I vel of shoreline protectto storm

pre ervation enhancements that prov1 f:. ;rovide an appropriate level of

damage reduction for a SO-year proJec I ' "thd"1sabilities· represent a

, edge for persons wi • • acce sibilily to the waters . Ii struction and maintenm1ce, and; contmue

reasonable costs to local agencies con fEngineers in consultation with the to meet approval of the U.S. A1:11Y oflirpso Jhc draft sco ea ears to address

:flj"gmm; Preset at1on O 1cer. -

Illinois tae '. . d I ld treat each with equal importance. - each of these cntcna, an s 1ou

. . mmit to stipulations other than those listed _in While the Park D1stnct does not co r, th l\linois Shoreline Erosion lntenm

l1e 1993 "Memorandum of Agreement orI e 1· l of any preservation options

.d • for the exp ora 101 .

3 " we welcome outs1 e review k I w I can be of assistance. that can meet project criteria. Please Jet me now 10

Sincerely,

Robert Rejman .

Director of Lakefront Construction

Chicago Park District

A II 11 1H II 0 0 6

Frederick Kopko prepares a nametag while Alice Chandler tends the table.

Rosenwald Tour a Success

On August 27, 2006, Mr. Frederick and Mrs. Mary Beth Kopko, owners of the Rosenwald mansion at 49th Street and Ellis Avenue, welcomed Hyde Park Historical Society members co an exclusive tour of this 1903 architectural masterpiece.

Designed by architects George C. Nimmons and William K. Fellows, the house emphasizes the horizontal plane, arguably the single most important characteristic of the Prairie School. It was built for Julius Rosenwald, Augusta, his wife, and his five children. Its 22 rooms include, on the ground floor, a reception gallery and solarium, living room, dining room, music room, kitchen, and powder rooms. On other floors can be found a library, parlor, and numerous bedrooms. The third floor holds a 20 x 40 ft. ballroom and sitting

room, and the basement a billiard room.

Julius Rosenwald, born in Springfield, Illinois in 1862, began his career in Chicago in the men's clothing business. After purchasing a major interest in the Sears, Roebuck Company in the 1890s, he rose to prominence as the leader of one of the country's most important business operations.

Rosenwald's charitable giving led co the establishment of a major fund dedicated co, among other things, supporting private schools for African-Americans in southern states, providing affordable health care to the disadvantaged, developing artistic talent, assisting entrepreneurs in a variety of businesses, and constructing public schools in poorer areas of the south. These schools became known,

collectively, as the Rosenwald Schools.

In 1931, the director of the Rosenwald Fund suggested that Julius Rosenwald donate the house to the Fund. Initially reluctant co do so, he ultimately changed his mind. After his death in 1932, the house became an office for the Fund until the Fund ended in 1948. At that time, the structure was passed to the University of Chicago for use as housing for Baptist graduate students. By the late 1970s, the house was virtually abandoned and in need of major repairs'.

The Kenwood Open House Committee, the Hyde Park Historical Society, and other community organizations spearheaded efforts to preserve the property. The situation came to a fortuitous conclusion in the early 1980s when the current owners purchased the property, retaining it as a single family dwelling with combined garage and coach house, and a large yard. Peter Ascoli, Rosenwald's grandson and

Jesse Bradford, Carol Bradford, and Alice Chandler enjoy the Rosenwald House's garden.

biographer, reported that when he cook his mother, Marion Rosenwald Ascoli, to the home in 1989, a year before her death, "she was overwhelmed at the job they had done."2

HPHS members were fortunate to have had the opportunity co see one of Chicago's true architectural gems.

This article is based on a report prepared by Carol Bradford. FSV

References

1. Ascoli, Peter, correspondence with the author.

2. Ascoli, ibid.

Au•umn 2006

CorneI I and Despres Awards

Images from students' history projects recently on display at HPHS Headquarters:

Please remember that the Hyde Park Historical Society is seeking recommendations for Paul Cornell Awards and Marion and Leon Despres Preservation Awards. This year's awards will be presented at the Society's annual banquet on February 24, 2007.

Dr.

argaret Burroughs is recogniz

20 as a "HistoryMakcr".

;;

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Nomination forms are now available in the HPHS

headquarters at 5529 South Lake Park Avenue.

The following news item, submitted by Bert Benade, was p1tb!ished in Chicago's Great South Shore,John C. Spray, ed., South Shore P1tblishing Company. 1930.

Margaret Burroughs was the subject of the history project prepared

by Henry Denoris, Hyde Park High School.

"In the Stands with the People: Bill Veeck", was prepared by Anatoly

Karroll, Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire.

Hyde Park Dames Club

Beginning its history February 18, 1919, the Hyde Park Dames Club is a social organization make up of the wives of the Hyde Park High School men's faculty and the married women teachers of that institution to promote better fellowship among its members. The club meets at the homes of members, dispensing cheer, good feeling, and sympathy.

The gatherings take the form of afternoon teas for the most part, and each year a dinner and a picnic are given, at which the husbands are entertained, establishing a closer bond of friendship among the members and faculty.

The Hyde Park Dames Club has continued (to be) an alive and flourishing organization from its foundation, working a helpful influence over the members of the school faculty and creating a wholesome atmosphere for the student body.

.................

HELP WANTED

.................

A u I u m n 2 0 0 6

Street Names: Part 2

Claude Weil loves Chicago and, in his words, has explored it "from end to end." As a history buff, he is fascinated by language and names wherever they appear. He offers the followlng list of the origin of local street names taken from Streetwise Chicago, by Hayner and McNamee, Loyola University Press, 1988.

Avalon Avenue (1232 E. from 7630 S. to 9858 S. The Isle of Avalon is thought to be the burial place of England's legendary King Arthur.

Bennett Avenue (1900 E. from 6700 S. to 9556 S.) John Ira Bennett was a Civil War colonel, Chicago lawyer, suburban village president and federal court judge. Bennett was born on a Quaker fa.t;m in Otsego, New York, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Union College, and in 1857 was admitted to the Tennessee Bar. Fifteen years later, after serving as a Union recruited in the Civil War and practicing law downstate, he moved to Chicago with his wife, Maria. In 1879, he was appointed one of the masters in the chancery division of the U. S. District Court for the Northern Illinois region. That same year he served as president of Hyde Park, which was then an independent village (Personal note: I knew an Ira Bennett at Ray Elementary School in 1942-1944.

Probably a descendent. CW)

Cornell Avenue (1600 E. from 4818 S. to 9326 S.) and Cornell Drive (1632 E. in Jackson Park). On the day Paul Cornell arrived in Chicago, somebody stole his suitcase. But he had $11.50 in his pocket and some business cards, so he stuck around. Cornell (1822- 1904) founded Hyde Park and promoted the development of Chicago's celebrated lakeside park system. He practiced law, speculated in real estate, founded a cemetery and insurance company, and even started a bronzing company that would cast the lions that stand guard today before the Arc Institute of Chicago.

Paul Cornell was born in White Creek, New York. At the age of nine he moved with his family to Schuyler County, Illinois, and worked as a farmhand to pay for his schooling. Admitted to the bar in 1847,

he came to Chicago in a stagecoach to seek his fortune. In 1853 he purchased 300 acres of lakefront property near 53rd Street and laid out the suburb of Hyde Park and arranged for Illinois Central commuter train service. Along 1 and ½ miles of lake frontage in his new suburb, he developed a pleasure park for the general public.

Cornell was a tireless promoter of parks, predicting that they would give "lungs to the great city and its

future generations. He was instrumental in getting a state bill passed that founded the South Parks system. Cornell also founded the Republic Life Insurance Company and the American Bronze Company. He is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, which he helped to found, on Chicago's South Side.

Dante Avenue (1432 E. from 6330 S. to 9158 S) is named for Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages, who wrote The Divine Comedy and other classical works.

Aul·umn 2006

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Chicago's Finest Transportation: The Illinois Central Electric

67th Street Station looking north, September, 1926

Second part of a series about the history of the Illinois Central Railroad's Electric Commuter Service

business.1 In Cleveland, the Van Sweringen brothers

transcended mere real estate development with their Terminal Tower-Cleveland Union Terminal project.

I By John G. Allen and Roy G. Benedict

This project, which involved large-scale urban design

MR. MOTTIER'S IMPRINT

ome of the great achievements in urban electric railroading have been the results of bold individual

initiatives. Chicago's utility magnate Samuel Insull and his assistant Britton Budd spearheaded the North Shore Line's Skokie Valley Route, a high-speed bypass route that enabled the electric interurban to compete with the steam railroads for Chicago-Milwaukee

as much as it did transportation, sought to bring downtown into competition with Chicago and the great cities of the Northeast, and announced through its grand scale that Cleveland was a metropolis to

be contended with.2 Perhaps most dramatically, Pennsylvania Railroad president Alexander Cassatt (whose sister Mary was a similarly imaginative innovator in the fine arts) decided to tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan and build Pennsylvania ►8

-<O Station, thus competing head-to-head with the New York Central.3

Although the Illinois Central electrification was also a major infrastructure project, the IC's decision to electrify was very much a joint one, involving the railroad's top management, the City of Chicago, and the South Park Commission. Nevertheless, even in such siruacions, exceptionally foresighted managers sometimes cake charge. The Illinois Central's C.H.

Mortier stands out among the various parties involved as a visionary of historic proportions.

of consolidation than growth, he was a pacesetter who was constantly devising better ways to do things.

Transportation historians Roy Benedict and Norman Carlson, who interviewed Mortier after he retired from the railroad, tell this story:

Shortly before the Great Depression rendered it impossible, the IC was contemplating an air rights development over the South Water Street yard, the location of today's Illinois

Center. They were foreseeing an expense in getting street traffic access to the new buildings.

So Mr. Mottier took a vacation, and

"Born on a farm

near Gibson City, Ill., on April 21 , 1888, I attended a one-room,

one-teacher schoolhouse until I entered high school, with one

year in between working on the farm. In 1910

I received a

degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois.

"Upon being graduated, I took Professor Ira Baker's recommendation of a railroad job, because he said it would give me a wider range of experience.

I found railroad engineering intensely interesting and never regretted the choice."

(Years later the V. of I. gave an

engineering award namt!d after Professor Baker to Motlier.)

he was sitting in the club car on a train in the West, and it occurred to him that double-decking the streets would solve the problem. 6 He turned to the man next to him and said, "I have just tho1,1ght

of a way to save my company a million dollars!"

The man looked at him as if he were daft, and got up and moved away.

But there was nothing daft about the Chicago terminal improvements.

As with the idea to double-deck the streets in what is now Illinois Center, the IC's electrification was

Charles H. Mortier enjoyed a long and distinguished career with the Illinois Central. The railroad

industry was mature by the time the IC decided on electrification, but there was still enough investment and technological change to provide opporcuni ties for talented, ambitious innovators who sought to leave great things for posterity. Born in downstate Illinois in 1888, Mortier attended a one-room grade school.4 He graduated from the University of Illinois' civil engineering program with a specialty in railroading

(then an important field of civil engineering education, in which the University of Illinois was a recognized leader).

Hiring on with the IC, Mortier rose within the organization to be placed in charge of the railroad's entire Chicago terminal improvement project-the centerpiece of which was the electrification of the South Side commuter service. Not included in this effort was the railroad's much smaller commuter service to west suburban Addison, which even at its height had only four round trips, and was discontinued in 1931.5

To chis day, Metra Electric's physical plant bears

Mottier's imprint. Two articles he wrote in the company magazine--one about the electrification in 1926 and another about Randolph St. Station in 1931-show an unusually thorough understanding both of the broad picture and the details. Although

Mortier was in an industry which was more in a state

conceptually very advanced for its time and remains so to chis day. Before the Iflinois Central installed the electric wires, those pares of the main line south of

Hyde Park and Woodlawn not already grade-separated were put on a raised embankment all the way to south suburban Matteson. This was just the beginning of a mammoth effort co completely remake the railroad.

Imm

Cover photo: 67th Street Station photograph from: Alan R. Lind, Limiteds along the Lakefront: The Illinois Central in Chicago. Park Forest, IL, Transport History Press, 1986, p. 70.

I William D. Middleton, North Shore: America's Fastest Interurban,

San Marino, CA: Golden West Books, 1964. Part of the Skokie Valley Route survives to this day as the Chicago Transit Authority's Skokie Swift (Yellow Line).

2 Herbert H. Harwood, Invisible Giants: The Empires of Cleveland's Van Sweringen Brothers, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003. 3 Lorraine B. Diehl, The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

4 C.H. Mottier: memoirs of a master builder." Illinois Central Gulf

Magazine, December 1975, p. 11.

5 Norman Carlson, "The Addison Man", Green Diamond (Illinois Central Historical Society), Dec. 2003.

6 Today, Chicago's Wacker Drive, with its upper and lower levels, is an example of a double-decked street. Other streets in what is now Illinois Center, such as Columbus Drive, are also double-decked.

Wlnlcr 2007

Finding History in Jackson Park: Luxfer Architectural Prism Glass Under the Willows

Carol and Leo Herzenberg

What would you expect to find where a hundred year-old willow tree was uprooted and blown over by a storm in Jackson Park? Surprise-a big glass prism with a historic past!

One Saturday in November, members of a group of Hyde Park birding enthusiasts walked along the south shore of the lagoon east of Wooded Island and

came by a location where a large weeping willow tree had been uprooted, one of the many trees destroyed by the recent storms. Partially covered by the dirt in

the restored surface was a large piece of very unusually shaped glass which we retrieved. We wiped some of the dirt off, and examined it. What was it? What could it possibly be? There was some information printed on the glass artifact that was difficult to decipher through the dirt still clinging to the surfaces, but we were able to read a date that seemed to be "something 1897." Good enough to take home and wash off the dirt and examine the chunk of glass in a more leisurely fashion!

We took this large piece of glass home and washed it. It weighed a little over one pound and was a prism-shaped,

with triangular cross section of about 5 by 3 by 2 inches. The 2" by 5" side

showed a fracture from a larger piece of glass. Each of the two triangular sides had a corrugated surface. After it was clean, we found the big clue: a word visible on one surface which, when seen through the glass read "LUXFER." There was further text on the glass: "PATENTED", with 18 separate patent dates listed from October 1881 to July 1897.

To investigate further, we went to the computer and searched the internet for LUXFER. Quickly we found an

article, "'The Century's Triumph in Lighting': The Luxfer Prism Companies and their Contribution to Early Modern Architecture". So it was architectural glass! An innovation of the Luxfer Prism Company was the introduction of glass tiles with horizontal corrugations that redirected sunlight from windows and other surfaces where light was plentiful back deep into rooms that would otherwise be darker, reducing

the need for artificial lighting. The glass tiles were used in many historic buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright designed some of the prism tiles and was one of the patent holders. Further search on the internet found "http://www.glassian.org/Prism/index.html," which describes several types of architectural glass, with illustrations. The particular piece we were studying looked very much like a fragment of an illustrated prism, a Luxfer 5" vault light. "Safely lighting a ship's interior with daylight and prisms instead of flames was a practice widely adopted" is quoted from the descriptive text beside the illustration. This concept was later applied to structures on land, for example to illuminate basements that extend under sidewalks.

We found that the company's head offices had

been right here in Chicago, on east Madison, and the factory where the glass was manufactured had also been located in Chicago, near 37th and Morgan. This particular piece of glass includes a large bubble that would have ruined a camera lens but may not have mattered in this application. But could this glass prism have been a factory reject? Or could this artifact have come from building demolition? Or could it even have been a prism used on a ship, and found its way under the willow from ship debris washed ashore by waves and used as part of the landfill used to create

the Wooded Island lagoon area? The dates on the prism exclude it from being present during the initial creation of the site for the Chicago World's Fair and

Columbian exposition of 1893. However, it seems likely that it was emplaced during the reconstruction of Jackson Park after the Columbian Exposition, especially since we have been told that those beautiful weeping willow trees were originally planted during the reconstruction of the park in 1905.

Finding objects with interesting histories can be such a pleasure! i:mill

W,n.er 2007

Marian Despres, 1909-2007

The Hyde Park Historical Society has learned of the death, on January 4, 2007, of Marian Despres, wife

of former Fifth Ward Alderman Leon M. Despres. Mrs. Despres was 97. Long a beloved member of the Hyde Park community and the Hyde Park Historical Society, Mrs. Despres was active in architectural preservation, racial equity, education, local politics, and art. She received a doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1936, after which she worked at the Jewish Children's Bureau and taught psychology at Roosevelt University. Her father, Alfred

S. Alschuler, designed KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue, 1100 East Hyde Park Boulevard, where services for Mrs. Despres will take place January 14, 2007.

Taken, in part, from the obituary written by Trevor Jensen that appeared in theJanuary 6, 2006 Chicago Tribune.

·························WELCOME! .........................

The Hyde Park Historical Society is pleased to welcome Chelsey Parrott-Sheffer as its new Membership Chairman. Chelsey replaced Iris Frank in this position on December 15, 2006.

Chelsey hails from Jacksonville, Illinois, and received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and a master's degree in modern American history from Ohio State University. Chelsey and her husband, Adam, live in Hyde Park. She currently works as a proofreader and fact-checker for Pearson Education in Glenview; her husband is director of instruction for a Lighthouse Charter School in East Chicago, Indiana.

Please direct all membership matters to: Chelsey Parrott-Sheffer, 5200 S. Blackstone Ave, Apt. 1009, Chicago, IL 60615.

We are fortunate to have Chelsey join our group!

HPHS celebrated the publication of the book, Earl 8. Dickerson: A Voice for Freedom and Equality,

by Robert J. Blakely with Marcus Shepard. Celebrants are, left to right, Kale Williams, Leonard Rubinowitz, Alta Blakely, Marcus Shepard, and Timuel Black.

Wln t>r 2007

Stineway's Drugstore: Remembering 57th Street

By Jane Mather

In the 1950s and 1960s, Stineway's Drugstore was located on the southwest corner of 57th Street and Kenwood Avenue where the Noodles restaurant is now. Like many drugstores at the time, Stineway's no longer had a soda fountain. Customers got their food and drinks from a limited menu cafeteria and carried

them either to a chrome and Formica table between the serving counters or to a booth by the window.

When the store was rebuilt after the fire in Wright's Laundry next door, someone in management decided that it was located near what they apparently perceived as a college. On the new back wall was one of those

all-purpose campus murals, wonderfully incongruous to the neighborhood of University of Chicago whose students and faculty hardly think of themselves as

typical. The mural was full of scenes depicting a rah-rah college life of the kind that probably only ever really existed on the musical stage. I remember it as having football helmets, graduation caps, and a few tastefully scattered books.

Since the booths were against a plate glass window that faced 57th Street, it was always easy to spot and drop in on your friends sitting in them. You could buy your small children an ice cream cone and let them sit where they could be amused by the street life. Years later, when one of the many restaurants that later temporarily occupied that site set up a play space for children, I noticed that mothers from Bixler

playground, catty-cornered across the street, came into the restaurant, just as we used to. Their children seemed to me to be much worse behaved than ours had been, but then I find that I do tend to suppress any memory of just how awful my children could be. Where my generation frequently did without coffee so their kids could have ice cream cones, these more affluent young women ordered entrees for the kids and didn't get upset when they didn't finish chem.

Every time the store got a new manager, he (it was always a he) would become outraged at the many customers who ordered one cup of coffee, one of those little metal pots of tea or, in my case, two chocolate ice cream cones, and then sat at the tables or booths for hours. He would attempt to enforce or create some rule to prevent chis flagrant theft of the corporation's profit. It had to have been one of those novices who was observed growing increasingly exasperated over

the prolonged presence of four middle-aged gentlemen who seemed to have nothing better to do than sit for hours over cups of cold coffee, talking and drawing on paper napkins. The irate manager stormed up to the

cable and sternly told the offenders that they would have to leave. They did so apologetically, leaving behind a cheerful graduate student who informed the fuming defender of the management's dime cups that he had "just thrown three Nobel Prize winners out of his crummy store."

I was never sure of the truthfulness of chis story. It

sounded much like wish fulfillment until one day, as I walked past Stineway's with Nella Fermi Weiner, she said, "Did you know that my father once got thrown out of here?" Well, that was one Nobel Prize winner for sure. Does any reader know who the ocher ones were?

Winier 2007

111i nois Central Hospital: Wi11 it be DemoIished?

The Illinois Central Hospital is a four-story masonry building in the Georgian Classical style. It was included in the Hyde Park - Kenwood National Register Historic District in 1979. In 1986 it was rated "orange" in the Chicago Historic Resources Survey. "Orange" is the second highest category, just below "red," which identifies landmark-quality buildings like the Robie House. As an "orange-rated" building, an application to demolish it must be held by the City of Chicago for 90 days before issuance. The waiting period allows for

public comment.

The building is of historical importance for three reasons. The architect, Richard Schmidt, was one of Chicago's most important "modern" architects of the early 20th Century. Secondly, the design stands at the very beginning of the development of the "modern" hospital. And lastly, its scale and siting are almost perfect examples of the City Beautiful movement

as exemplified in Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan for Chicago.

The Illinois Central Hospital building currently stands vacant and was recently bought by the University of Chicago. The University has announced that it plans to build on the site but has not stated

its intentions regarding the existing building which is in very good condition and exhibits no major deterioration.

Henry Clay Work: More than a Songwriter

Henry Clay Work, whose hand crafted cottage stands behind the frame house at 5317 South Dorchester Avenue, wrote some of the most famous songs of the period in which he lived, 1832-1885. Songs include Lost on the Lady Elgin (1862), Marching Through Georgia (1865), and Grandfather's Clock (1876).

Not only was he a fine carpenter and composer, he was also a conscientious citizen of Hyde Park serving, in

the 1860s, as Clerk of the Hyde Park Village Board of Trustees. His

carefully scripted minutes are filed for posterity at the Illinois Regional Archives Depository in the Ronald Williams Library of Northeastern Illinois University.

HPHS Members Participate in Humanities Day 2006 Programs

On Saturday, October 28, 2006, three HPHS members lent their expertise on local history to the University of Chicago's Humanities Day. Sam Guard gave a presentation about Midway Gardens, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1913. Described as the nation's leading performing arts venue, it featured opera, sculpture, orchestras, and abstract murals. It was demolished only fifteen years later and replaced with a gas station.*

Beth Ann Johnson, also of the Society, described how Booker T. Washington's pedagogy became a part of American architecture. Tuskegee Institbte, founded by Washington, was the center of formal architectural training under the tutelage of Robert Robinson Taylor. Tuskegee graduates went on tO design much of Grambling State University and other structures in metropolitan areas like Chicago and New York.

In the afternoon, Jack Spicer led approximately 45 interested participants on an afternoon tour of Hyde Park's Prornonrory Point, describing the Point's history and controversial proposals for renovation.

*A longer article by Sam Guard abottt Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens will appear in a future issue of the newsletter.

Winfcr 2007

Reminiscing at the Open House

Mrs. Robert Donald Erickson relates her family's experiences with the famous Christmas tree in the Walnut Room of Marshall Field's at the December 3 Society Open House. More than 25 people visited the Society's headquarters to partake of good cheer and see seasonal ornaments and decorations contributed by Carol Bradford, Djani Edwards, Judy Roothaan, and Fran Vandervoort.

Watch out for the Cattle

Be it ordained that the driving of Cattle from adjoining towns into this town to be herded by and the same (sic) is hereby prohibited also that the driving of Cattle from the City of Chicago into this town to be herded on the vacant lots and lands is hereby prohibited.

Signed, Geo. M. Bogue, Secy.

From the Minutes of the Hyde Park Village Board,

September 9, 1867.

Naming South Side Parks

Resolved that the east of the South Parks be called Jackson Park and that the west of the South Parks be called Washington Park.

From the Minutes of the Meeting of the South Park Commissioners, February 9, 1881.

Winier 2007

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Hyde Park Historical Society Annual Meeting 2007

Jay Mulberry welcomes guests to the Dinner Douglas Anderson presents a Cornell Award to Mollie Stone of the Chicago Children's Choir

early 150 guests braved heavy rain to attend the Society's annual meeting and dinner, held

on Saturday, February 24, at the Quadrangle Club. Bob Ashenhurst's timely piano playing gave way to the clear young voices of singers from the Chicago Children's Choir, a winner of the Society's Cornell Awards, After a chicken dinner with sauteed vegetables, President Carol Bradford welcomed guests, described current Society activities, and gave retiring Archivist Steve Treffman a special award for his many years of dedicated service.

Douglas Anderson presented the first Cornell Award of 2006 to Mollie Stone of the Chicago Children's Choir's to note fifty years of musical excellence in Hyde Park. Northwestern University Press was honored

for publishing four books about or by individuals

who have played important roles in Chicago: Earl

B. Dickerson: A Voice for Freedom and Equality, written by Robert Blakely with Marcus Shepard (2006), Bridges of Memory, by Timuel Black (2003), Challenging the Daley Machine by Leon M. Despres (2005), and Knocking Down Barriers, by Truman

K. Gibson, Jr. (2005). This award was granted to the Press's Donna Shear by Bert Benade. Frances Vandervoort, Chairman of the Cornell Committee, presented a Cornell Award to Mary Ryan Schlesinger for locating, indentifying, and documenting nearly

500 photographs of razed Hyde Park buildings. Prints of these photographs are now located in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library.

2006 Marian and Leon Despres Preservation ►

Tim Black enjoys the program

«O Awards were presented by Jack Spicer, Preservation Committee Chairman, to three organizations involved in the architectural preservation of the Kenwood neighborhood. These organizations are the Kenwood Open House Committee, represented by Diane Gray and Jean Laves, the South East Chicago Commission, represented by Robert Mason, and c-he Commission on Chicago Landmarks, represented by David Mosena.

Following the Awards presentations, former Hyde Parker Andrew Pamer, Kenwood High School graduate, a distinguished critic of the arts in Chicago and elsewhere, entertained the audience with his commentary, Reflections on an Urban Renewal Childhood. In addition to many other responsibilities, Andrew writes abom the arts for the Chicago Sun Times. This talk was a revelation for older Society members, for whom local history fails to include

much at all that happened after 1950. We can all look forward to the publication of this fine talk. FSV

Bert Benade presents a Cornell Award to Donna Shear of Northwestern University Press.

Andrew Patner with Alta Blakely, his former journalism teacher

S p r I 11 g 2 0 0 7

Letter to Marian

This letter, donated to the Society by former Fifth Ward Alderman and Honorary Board Member Leon Despres, was written to his wife

Marian on April 12, 1992. It sets the stage for an issue of the Society's newsletter that will commemorate this remarkable woman, who died in

January.

My darling,

You say you think I don't appreciate you. Maybe you are joking, because you know how much I love and appreciate you. Nevertheless I will try to tell you, at least in part.

I love you, deeply. I love you for the raptures of love you have given me. I love you for

- the enduring quality of your love.

- your voice.

- your eyes and eye lashes.

- your love of a hot bath.

- your remarkable friendliness of manner.

- your understanding of poetry and art. It is exceptional.

- your foresight and ability to plan.

- your extraordinary intellect and high standards of intellectual work.

- your thoughtfulness for the welfare of others, including your children and me.

- your humor and your humorous puncturing of bombast.

- your personal strength of character and integrity.

- your sense of style and dash.

- your enjoyment and enthusiasm for so many, many things.

- your appreciation of genuine greatness.

- your driving standards. You have saved my life a hundred times.

- your delight in sweet egg, and you have become a great cook.

- the clothes you have advised me to buy.

- your love of high quality in everything.

- the joy you give me in traveling.

- your warmth in bed.

- your vitality.

- your smile.

There are more. This is a beginning.

All my love, Len

Please contribute memories, photographs, comments, and stories of any kind about Marian Despres to the Editor, Hyde Park History, 5529 South Lake Park Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, or to Frances Vandervoort at vandersand@sbcglobal.net, or to the Society's website: www.hydeparkhistory.org. The Society's telephone number is: (773) 493-1893.

Resolution Forbidding

• • NEW HPHS MEMBER ••

The Removal of Sand

"Resolved that the removal or sale of sand from the Lake Shore of the Park be entirely prohibited and the money refunded on outstanding tickets."

South Park Commission, 29 April 1873

Columbian Exposition DVD

Visitors and exhibitors at the Society's annual Show and Tell enjoyed a new DVD, Expo: Magic of the White City, a detailed account of the colorful history of the great 1893 Columbian Exposition. The DVD, narrated by Gene Wilder, lasts approximately two hours. It can be ordered from shopPBS.com for

$24.95 plus shipping.

The Society is delighted to welcome Jacob Alexander Olar, born January 29, 2007, to members John and Shirley Olar. Shirley Olar is now on leave from her responsi biIity of Chairman of the Program Committee.

•

S I>

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Showing, Telling, and Learning about Hyde Park

Once again, Society members proved that they have a lot to show and a lot to talk about. On Saturday, March 24, nearly a dozen members brought exhibits to the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, where at least 30 visitors dropped by to see what could be learned about Hyde Park roots.

Projects included:

High school yearbooks brought by Rita Allen and Mark Mandle. Rita brought a collection of Aitchpees, Hyde Park High School's yearbooks from 1918, 1939, and the late 1940s, collected by her husband, Richard Allen. Mark's yearbooks included a 1910 yearbook from Wendell Phillips High SG!1ool, where his grandfather played on the football team, and

photo captured a lion's huge foot poking beneath the bars of his cage. "This lion scared people by roaring all night long," laughed Fred. The circus also had an

elephant and a magnificent white horse with a braided mane. Fred didn't know if the horse's broad back had been danced upon by a bareback rider.

Clippings from local papers about such local

luminaries as Leon Despres, Martin Marty, Earl Dickerson, Robert Blakely, Gladys Scott, Barbara Krell, and George Anastaplo brought by Carol Benade, an inveterate collector of biographies and obituaries.

Posters, brought by Jack Spicer, of Kenwood Landmark

District houses,

Learning the history of the United Church of Hyde Park

The posters

Carol Benade and her clippings

Mary Ryan Schlesinger talks with Jack Spicer

yearbooks from Bowen and Hyde Park High Schools.

Fred Blum's photos, from 1959 or 1960, when the circus came to Hyde Park, specifically to the site of the current Hyde Park Neighborhood Club. One

Jack Spicer and Roger Huff discuss Professors' Row Houses

were on exhibit at the Society's annual dinner in February. '

Photos of the houses of "Professor's Row," near 56th Street and Kenwood Avenue, brought by Kathy and Roger Huff.

A large map, brought by Bert Benade and probably dating from the late 1850s, showing the Presbyterian Theological Seminary's proposed site at the current location of the Museum of Science and Industry.

s " I' II g 2 0 0 7

These plans, said Bert, were cancelled before ground was even broken. Bert also had booklets about the Manhattan Project for the first atamic bomb, and lithographs of buildings found on the early University of Chicago campus.

Photographs of both Windermere West and Windermere East Hotels, brought by Thomas Pavelic, a real tor and long-time resident of Cornell Avenue near 56th Street. The photas included images of the lobbies, the Anchorage Restaurant, and gardens.

Images and memorabilia from the United Church of Hyde Park, brought by Carol Bradford. Formerly the Hyde Park Methodist Church, it was built in 1889 and is located at 5 3rd Street and Blackstone Avenue.

Mary Ryan Schlesinger's exhibit of photagraphs of razed Hyde Park buildings, which attracted special attention. The collection of photographs is permanently housed at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library. Mary's efforts earned her the

Cornell Award from the Histarical Society at the 2007 banquet. FSV

Hyde Park Township Street Names 111

Cla11de Weils interest in local street names continms. Like the previous list. this comes from Streetwise Chicago, bltt Hayner and McNamee, Loyola University Press, 1988.

Everett Ave between East End Park and 56th Street

Edward Everett (1794-1865 ), a Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of State under President Millard Fillmore, was renowned for his oratorical flare, although President Lincoln upstaged him with his Gettysburg address.

Kimbark Ave. 1300 E. from 4700 S. to 9358 S.

Seneca D. Kimbark,who moved from New York to

park. The settlement was named for Ridgewood, New Jersey, the home state of many early Chicagoans.

Torrence Ave. 2634 E. from 9500 S. to 13738 S. Joseph T. Torrence, born in Mercer City, PA, was a blacksmith, blast furnace builder, a union fighter,

a developer of Calumet Harbor, a promoter of the Chicago elevated train system and a wealthy man. In the Civil War, he served as a Major General under Grant. He was a founding father of East Chicago,

Indiana, where he owned 1,000 acres. Imm

Chicago in the 1850s, was in the manufacturing and iron businesses. He was a charter member of the South Park District Board of Commissioners and helped establish Jackson and Washington Parks and the Midway.

Merrill Ave., 2132 E. from 6700 S. to 13758 S.

George WE. Merrill was a South Side real estate developer. He was secretary of the Hook and Ladder Company of Chicago's volunteer fire department in 1837.

Ridgewood Court, 1368 E. from 5400 S. to 5482 S. Ridgewood was the name of a small settlement in the area before the development of the suburb of Hyde

S I> r n 9 0 0 7

Hyde Park Businesses:

1929 - 1960

Bob Enemark, who describes himself as a "ragamuffin (who ran around with his) gang at 55th and Woodlawn" in the 193Os and 1940s, submitted the following account of his experiences during these times.

I was born in 1933, and grew up on the third floor of the four-story apartment building at 1202 E. 55th that overlooked St. Thomas's Church and School. I was in the St. Thomas's Boy Scout Troop 503 and became their first Eagle Scout. On Saturday we would go to the cartoon show at the Frolic Theater on 55th Street; quite a treat for us kids of Hyde Park.

In 1929 my father, Roland Enemark, opened a small auto parts company on 55th Street in the building now housing the Woodlawn Tap.

At that time Hyde Park had many business owners who helped form the spirit of old Hyde Park. I came to know many members of the Japanese community that moved in during WW II. My father hired Benny and Masoto Ozaki for his company. Japanese people also worked for other automotive companies, and for Hyde Park businesses such as restaurants and food stores.

I remember Breslauer's (department store), on

the north side of 55th Street between Kimbark and Kenwood Avenues, across from the post office, as the place where we bought our clothing. Let's not forget Finnigan's Drug Store at 55th and Woodlawn with the soda fountain and glass tables. This drug store is now at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Little is known of the great people that ran these stores, including Sam Bell of the local Shell Station at 47th Street and Lake Park Avenue. Sam was the

spark plug in the Lions and Hyde Park Businessman's Clubs.

After my father died in 1959, I took over Enemark's Auto Supply. At the present location of the fire station was a tavern called the Compass which became the Second City. I would have a beer while watching the performers on the small stage. University students

in the audience would go from the Compass to the

University Tavern and then down to Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap.

The last location for the auto supply company was 1035 East 55th Street, between Ellis and Greenwood Av enues.

According to community hear say, the University Bank weathered the depression when people withdrew money and took it to the post office to invest in govern ment bonds. The post office would then send the money back to the University Bank.

When people saw that the bank was

still operating, they stopped the run on the bank, which then rode out the 1929 crash.

Steve, the fellow who had the restaurant on Lake Park Avenue where the HPHS headquarters is now located, also had a hot dog cart. Once a year he would bring the cart to the Enemark Auto shop and have me repack the wheel bearing before he put the cart in a garage for the winter.

I encourage people to look into the history of stores and all the people that operated them. There is lots to learn here. !mm

A New Look at the Hyde Park Bank

More than thirty Society members were welcomed by bank staff and representatives of Florian rchitects to a guided tour of the newly renovated busmess floor of the Hyde Park Bank on Saturday, January 27, 2 07. Paul Florian, FAIA, chief architect, jokingly descnbed the bank's architectural style as either "Stripped-down Classical," or "Mussolini Modern." He gave surprising details about the bank's renovation and design, including the high cost of work on the ceilin4r

The bank's interior was lightened by restoring three large chandeliers and installing recessed lights in the newly-painted ceiling. White backdrnps and pale blue footlights contribute to the feelmg of amness.

Red onyx is used for check-writing desks and at _the ends of the long business area, the pattern of which picks up the design of the stair grilles. Tennessee granite lightens the floor. _

The bank's logo, shown on the outside cover of this newsletter, represents an integration of the first letter of the bank's name and the idea of overlapping arches. The logo is provided courtesy of the Hyde Park Bank.

The Hyde Park Bank will continue to please the eye as it serves the community. FSV

Mark your calendar!

UPCOMING

[VINTS

Saturday, April 28, 2007, 2 to 4 PM

Carol Bradford will present an exhibit from the 50th Anniversary of the Hyde Park United Church. Refreshments will be served.

Saturday, May 5, 2007, 3:00 p.m.

GREENING YOUR HISTORIC HOME

Green Home Partners will describe ways in which Hyde Park homeowners can make changes in their homes to reduce their carbon emissions and improve their quality of life.

Mark Ahlheim and Kirk Fox will address both major renovations and minor changes, as well as the general principles of green living. Green Home Partners acts as a real estate group, development corporation, an_d green renovation consultant group. They aim to help homeowners understand the benefits of owning a green home.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

will see Timuel Black discussing and sign his new book in the Chicago Lives series: Chicago's Second Generation of Black Migration. Details are being planned.

August may see another house tour.

Watch for future announcements.

In the works...

a film developed by undergraduates at the University of Chicago, "Where We Are," about urban change in Hyde Park as it affected University life.

Details are forthcoming.

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HPHS President Carol Bradford introduces her exhibit about early Hyde Parkers and their role in the development of the community on April 28, 2007. Her records were takes from the archives of the United Church of Hyde Park.

Recent Historical Society Activities and Events

Carol Bradford accepts the book, Women Building Chicago: 1790-1990, A Dictionary of Chicago Women's History, from Mary Aon Johnson, president of the Chicago Area Women's History Council on May 8, 2007.

Green Home Partner directors Mark Ahlheim (left) and Kirk Fox (right), with architectural historian Annie Stephenson, describe the retrofitting of older homes with green technology on Saturday, Tuesday, May 5, 2007.

Timuel Black and Jay Mullberry converse about Mr. Black's new book, Bridges of Memory, Volume 2: An Oral History of African American Migration to Chicago. This event took place at the Society's headquarters on Saturday, June 9, 2007.

Chicago's Finest Transportation:

The Illinois Central Electric

Third part of a series about the history of the Illinois Central Railroad's electric commuter service

By John G. Allen and Roy G. Benedict

BRAND-NEW TRACK ARRANGEMENTS

n addition to changing the elevation of the right of-way along much of the main line, the railroad

made radical changes to its track arrangements. Before electrification, the Illinois Central had several parallel double-track main lines, as Figure 1 shows. (Similarly, several main line railways in such European cities as London and Paris have separate, parallel sets of tracks for local and express trains.) The IC's parallel main lines for local suburban trains, through passenger trains, express suburban trains, and freight trains, developed through improvisation rather than an overall strategy. To reach their dedicated tracks from the suburban local tracks, suburban expresses had to cross the tracks normally used for through passenger trains.

As if that were not enough, the railroad had been forced to impose a rush-hour curfew on freight operations in its suburban territory, because even the freight tracks were needed to carry the large and growing numbers of commuters. (Today, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe [now known as the BNSF Railway] observes a similar period freight curfew to keep its tracks clear for commuter trains

during the rush hours, and the Union Pacific does the same thing on its West Line.)

With the IC's track capacity bursting at the seams, something systematic had to be done. Electrification offered an opportunity to start over with a largely clean slate, as the IC's C.H. Mortier (the subject of the previous installment in the Winter 2007 issue

of Hyde Park History) explained in an excellently written article in the company magazine.

Beca1tse of the great diffimlties incident to shifting tracks after electrifilation ( ... }, it was decided to make all grade separations and adjttstrnents in grades prior to ... electrification. ( .. .} The grade revisions between 27th and 51st streets were occasioned by a condition imposed

on (the IC} by the city of Chicago and the South Park Commissioners as one of the provisions of the so-called Lake Front Ordinance.

This postcard has no date, but the picture was probably taken not long after the start of electric seivice.

This view, looking north from Roosevelt Road, shows a northbound express.

From a study of the profile( ... } 61 per cent of the grade line between 27th Street and Richton had to be changed

to an extent that would require the relocation of tracks. It was decided, therefore, to study the location of tracks relative to the ... right-of-way so as to obtain ultimately

the maximum possible utilization of the property and red1tce to a minimum the probability of having to shift electrified tracks at some f1tture date. This ... meant the adoption of what might be termed a permanent track plan. I

To make its new electric commuter operation run smoothly, the IC completely overhauled its main line track arrangements. (The IC electrified its South Chicago and Blue Island branches, but made few changes to the arrangement of the tracks themselves, which still run at street level and have many grade

crossings with local streets.) Figure 2 shows the overall track plan between 11th Place (just north of Roosevelt Road) and the signal tower at 50th St., where the electrified line narrowed from six tracks ro four. The commuter trains (both the IC's and those of its tenant the South Shore Line) were kept on their own tracks, of which there were up to three in each direction. The inner tracks were used for locals (the IC operated locals to 53rd St., with station stops every half-mile, until 1955). Next were the tracks for the expresses, which made no stops until 53rd St. but then made most

stops to their destinations. These tracks are the outer tracks today. Finally, there were the far outer tracks (abandoned in 1962) which were used by rush-hour specials, trains which made even fewer stops than the expresses. The through passenger and freight tracks were moved to the east side of the right of way.

The same basic arrangement remains in place today. When the original commuter rail tracks 1 and 6 were, for the most part, abandoned, the railroad simply renumbered the remaining tracks, so there are no Metra Electric main line tracks bearing numbers higher than 4. Similarly, through passenger and freight trains now use the same pair of tracks (the tracks formerly reserved for intercity passenger trains).

By putting its local stations in the center, between the inbound and outbound tracks, the IC improved on the arrangements already in use on several four-track subway and electrified railroad lines in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, where the local tracks and stations are on the outside.2 Only a few other rail operations have adopted the IC's plan, which is also

in use on Chicago's North Side 'L' between Belmont

and Howard, and a Swedish railway main line in the Stockholm area. Even today, on four-track lines in the Northeast, local trains have to cross from one side of the alignment to the other when they need to reverse direction upon reaching the outer end of the line. The IC improved on these arrangements and minimized conflicts between locals and expresses. For many years,

trains changed ends at 53rd, 67th, 72nd, and 95th Streets, and the railroad built "pocket tracks" (long since removed) to the south of all of these stations so that trains could change ends without even getting in the way of other locals.

The only problems with the track layout were the reverse curve between 18th and 23rd Streets

(necessitated by the fact that Central Station, the IC's

Figure 1

Illinois Central - Before Electrification - Circa 1910

Track Arrangements Between Roosevelt Road and 50th St.

Schematic View - Looking West

+ Suburban - Outbound Local

---------- Suburban - Inbound Local

+ Through passenger - Outbound

---------- Through passenger - Inbound

---------- Suburban - Outbound Express

----------+ Suburban - Inbound Express

+ Freight - Outbound

----------+ Freight - Inbound

Figure 2

Illinois Central Electric - 1926 to f962

Track Arrangements Between Roosevelt Road and 50th St.

Schematic View - Looking West

+ Electric - Outbound Special (Track 1)

+ Electric - Outbound Express (Track 2)

+ Electric - Outbound Local (Track 3)

---------- Electric - Inbound Local (Track 4)

-----------+ Electric - Inbound Express (Track 5)

---------- Electric - Inbound Special (Track 6)

+ Steam/Diesel - Outbound passenger

---------- Steam/Diesel - Inbound passenger

+ Steam/Diesel - Outbound freight

---------- Steam/Diesel - Inbound freight

Still remaining.· four express and local tracks on Metra Electric (num bered 1 through 4), and the two former Illinois Central passenger tracks, now owned by Canadian National and used primarily by freight trains, as well as Amtrak trains.

intercity passenger terminal, was on the west side of the right-of-way), and the fact that the commuter tracks narrowed from six tracks to four and again from four tracks to two just before (rather than after) the stations at 53rd St - Hyde Park and 115th St. - Kensington, where additional tracks might have been helpful. It was intended to straighten out the ►8

-c:@ curve between 18th and 23rd Streets, and keep the commuter trains on the west side of the railroad's right-of-way once a permanent new terminal for through passenger trains had been built at Roosevelt Road to replace the IC's Romanesque Central Station, dating from 1893. But this new terminal was never built. Central Station was closed in 1972, and demolished in 1974, with the result that the track arrangements originally seen as temporary became permanent.

After situating the tracks in their proper places, the railroad proceeded to build the steel lattice wire support cowers still in use as far south as 115th St. -

Kensington (as well as the less elaborate support towers elsewhere on the electrified lines), string copper wires above the tracks, and install electric transmission equipment. (Incidentally, the IC chose G neral

Electric as its electrical equipment supplier. GE favored direct current systems, as opposed to its rival Westinghouse, which advocated alternating current for railroad electrification. Each firm specialized in

providing railroads with components for the type of electrification it favored). Imm

Cover photo: 67th Street Station photograph from: Alan R. Lind, Limiteds along the Lakefronc: The Illinois Central in Chicago. Park Forest, IL, Transport History Press, 1986, p. 70.

1 C.H. Mattier, "Electrification Work Near End". Illinois Central Magazine, June 1926, p. 11.

2 New York's Lexington Avenue IRT subway uses yet another set of track arrangements in Manhattan north of Grand Central. The local tracks, with their more frequent stations, are located one level below the street. The express tracks, with their less-frequent station platforms, are directly beneath the local tracks and stations.

Under Deadwood

A scenario by Mildred Goldberger and Jane Kome Mather

What follows is the prologue to the scenario, Under Deadwood, first performed at the Compass Theater, 54th Street and Lake Park Avenue, probably in March, 1956. This prologue was narrated by Mike Nichols.

Performers in Under Deadwood included Shelley Berman, Elaine May, and Andrew Duncan.

Narrator:

To begin at the beginning

It is Spring, sunless days in the small town, cloudful and sinless gray,

The squared walks alive and the hutched sportsters and quibblers' lairs seeping longingly

toward the swornaway, worndown, to-be-tornaway, swansdown-ashed area of Hyde Park A.

All of the people of the planned and planning town are walking now.

Look - the babies are walking, the physicists, unclear and nuclear,

the lecturers, students, and lecherers, countermen, biddy and the dull woman, bartender, drunkard, the Co-op member clutching his pink slips, and the tidy pot vender.

The young girls nestled and neat in Domino clothes, the boys in the ground-low squat MG miracles and the swanking, simpering sweethearts.

They walk, crabshuffle, glide, skip, or stalk, they stride co the scaring white squares on the wet wood, dry wood, deadwood.

The grafted cynic lies barnacled with disbelief, his pinnace beached by

the craftless greed of the lovers, lost, loveless, and mothers who softly appraise the silver-quivered thumbtack rage on the brown black, harshblack, lime-wracked tree shard.

Come closer now, you must share and know, feel and care about

the dreams they seek in the boxed gray lines fox eared under the deadwood.

From where you are, you can watch their dreams.

Four Departures

Frances S. Vandervoort

The past six months has seen the departure of four of Hyde Park's greatest ladies. Marian Despres, who passed away in January, was the most universally present of the four. With her halo of snowy hair and elegant bearing, she would welcome all who greeted her with warmth and grace. She and her husband, long-time 5th Ward alderman Leon Despres, were community fixtures for longer than most Hyde Parkers can remember. Did anyone work harder

than Marian Despres to preserve Chicago landmarks, including Glessner House on South Prairie Avenue and Hyde Park's Robie House.

Vi Fogle Uretz, who left us in May, was a superb artist who regularly exhibited her paintings at the 57th Street Art Fair. I remember her standing amidst glorious splashes of color beneath the trees on 56th Street (she was fortunate to occupy so lovely a spot!), smiling, discussing local issues with friends and customers, all the while supporting fellow artists at one of Hyde Park's best-known events.

I first met Vi as a fellow faculty wife. We both were married to men who worked in highly technical fields-molecular biology and biochemistry for her husband Bob; astronomy for my husband Peter. Our

husbands share a deep commitment co science and to the U niversicy of Chicago. Being married to such men can be a challenge-Vi was always at her husband's side.

Most recencl y, we learned of the death of Jane Harper Overton, who died June 3 in Chicago. As a biology teacher in the Chicago Public Schools,

I would sometimes seek advice from her about a particular subject in order co better present it to my students. She would invite me to her laboratory in Whitman Laboratory, located at 915 East 57th Street where the new Gordon Center for Integrative Science now stands. I had a special affection for this dark red brick two-story structure with high arched windows, cornice of filigreed brickwork, and a limestone rooster set in the molding atop front door. This building

was designed by Coolidge and Hogdon, the same architectural firm chat designed the Uoiversity's Bond Chapel and Abbott Hall. It was connected by a narrow passageway to the Allee Animal Behavior Laboratory, where many years ago I studied the behavior of doves, turtles, chicks, tropical fish, and a feisty hen turkey named Josephine.

Jane, whom I respectfully called Dr. Overton, would greet me in her tidy lab with a warm smile. She would hand me a document or carefully wrapped package

of some kind of laboratory equipment, taking care to explain how it should be used. She was one of a number of practicing scientists I knew I could call

upon to provide specimens, equipment, or advice too often in short supply in Chicago's public schools.

My husband and I once met her husband, George, in connection with environmental activities in Hyde Park and Chicago. I had not known she had children until I read of her death. She muse have been a wonderful mother. It was a pleasure to learn she was a fine artist as well.

I had come to know Nancy Hays in the early 1970s when we were both members of the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference. We soon found ourselves working together for the Hyde Park Herald. I had been recruited by the Herald to write a weekly column about local environmental issues-air quality, energy use, park issues, local wildlife and, of course, trees. I found myself a natural partner with Nancy, who sometimes jokingly called herself a Druid and claimed to know every tree in Hyde Park by its first name. She and I would set out to document parks, broken pavement, community gardens, damaged trees, and the status of the lakefront.

One of my more memorable experiences with Nancy occurred one Memorial Day morning early in the 1980s. On the telephone was Nancy's familiar voice. "Fran," she said. "Last night's windstorm blew down part of the large parakeet at 53rd Street and Hyde Park Boulevard. Lee's go see what's we can find." We drove co the park across from where Mayor Harold Washington used to observe these noisy birds from his apartment window, and found that fully three-fourths of the large, amorphous structure had tumbled to the ground, carrying a large broken branch with it. We scuffed as much of it as we could into the back of my old Volvo station wagon and brought it to my back yard. Among the numerous objects embedded in the stinking mass of twigs and feathers were plastic and paper scraps, aluminum pull tops, and corpses and bones of dead birds of all sizes. A learning experience for us all! ►G)

-<43 Nancy often walked the block from her house to Kenwood Academy to photograph students and

events at Kenwood Academy, where I taught biology from 1981 until 1994. She always knew the best angle to photograph a student's science fair project. She could also capture the essence of a play, dance, or piece of sculpture, or a smile, frown, or the set jaw of determination.

In 2004 I became a member of the Hyde Park Historical Society and soon learned of the

many wonderful things Nancy had done for this organization. Most recently she bequeathed the entire body of her photographic work-prints, slides, and negatives that span fifty years, and related documentation to the archives of the Society. The collection is now stored at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chi.cago's Regenstein Library.

After retiring from teaching in 2001, I joined the Jackson Park Advisory Council. Once again I found myself working with Nancy. She had had lost her agility and much of her hearing, but her

understanding of environmental issues never faltered. She remained committed to the future of Hyde Park until the very end.

These ladies are gone, and we are the poorer for

it. However, their gifts have made our community a better place for us all.

University National Bank: Correction and Question

In the latest newsletter as part of an article on growing up in Hyde Park in 1930s and 1940s, the false statement was made that the University National Bank survived because of money taken in and out and in again between the bank and the local post office.

This idea certainly is "street gossip" and totally untrue. The bank was guaranteed by U of C trustee Harold Swift because it was the bank where most university professors kept their money. It was robbed several times during the 1930s. On one occasion my mother (Ursula B.Stone) and I had just left the bank with me in my stroller. I upset her no end because

as the robbers' car took off shooting, I stood up and yelled, "bang bang!" Of course, I never heard the end of this! I actually got to know the smell of tear gas - I think each teller had a button or something to step on-I'm not sure.

Also, on 55th Street near Woodlawn in the 30s there was a hardware store run by a family called something like Borgeaus. An old matriarch sat in a black dress inside a glass "cage"-she was the cashier. The staff

had a white mouse they showed me when my dad took me there. It is possible my first tricycle came from there, too. Does anyone remember this store?

Marya! Stone Dale

Remembering Marian Despres

The Newsletter will be publishing comments in honor of beloved Hyde Parker Marian Despres, who passed away in jan11ary. Please send comments to the Newsletter e-mail or surface maii.

Douglas Anderson offers the following reflection.

Len and Marion Despres have been the strongest supporters I have had for group bird walks inJackson Park. They provided me with maps of Jackson Park, accompanied the first group walk in April, 1974, and continued to attend the bird walks as long as their health permitted.

Marian was responsible for my involvement in the Chicago Architecture Foundation, especially through her work to preserve Glessner House. Through this I b came, io 1989, a doc·ent with the Foundation.

The greatest tour I ever led in Jackson Park was two years ago. At that time, I had only one helper, who was not able to be present for the first tour held after the publication of The Devil In White City, the tremendously popular book by Erik Larson about a pathological killer who stalked young women who came to Chicago in 1893 to work at the Exposition. I

assumed that I could handle the tour, only to find that 110 people had showed up!

Somehow I did it. The tours have continued to be very popular.

Eleanor Petersen, 88

We have learned of the death of Eleanor Petersen, long-time Hyde Parker and Society member, on June 25 at age 88. Ms. Petersen, well known as a community activist, was a founder of the Hyde Park Federal Savings, Kenwood Open House Committee,

and Chicago Foundation for Women. She worked for racial equity in Hyde Park and Kenwood, and served as president of the Donors Fonun of Chicago from 1974 until 1987.

Her three sons, Scott, Todd, and Ross,,survive her.

Bob Mason (left) accepts the 2007 Marianand LeonDespres Award on behalf of the South East Chicago Commission at the annual dinner of the Hyde Park Historical Society on Saturday, February 24, 2007.

I 1

At the same event, Diane Gray and Jean Laves accept the Despres Award on behalf of the Kenwood Open House Committee.

David Mosena accepts the Despres Award as chairman of the Commission on ChicagoLandmarks.

Summ<'r 2007

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International House of Chicago

A Short History

This is the introdttctory portion of a talk given by Claude Weil to the Hyde Park Historical Society, on March 6, 2002. Claude was the former Resident and Associate Director of Business Affairs of International Home.

International House celebrates its 75th year in 2007. This report will continue in ftttun1 issues of the Newsletter.

Note: International Hottse will hold a number of important lectures, mmical events, and special presentations in 2007- 2008, including talks by authors Richard Dawkins (October 4) and James D. Watson (October 8). Visit the website,

http:IIihottse.uchicago. edu for details.

t sounds like an apocryphal story but Harry Edmonds relates in his memoirs how he got the idea for

International Houses. One day in 1909, when he was walking up the steps to the Columbia University library, he said hello to a young Chinese who stopped and said to him, "I've been in New York for three

weeks and this is the first time anyone has said hello to me." This struck Mr. Edmonds forcefully and suggested to him that there were probably many foreign students who had come to a strange land and felt very isolated.

At the time of the above encounter, Edmonds was an official at the YMCA. After talking to his wife, he started inviting foreign students to tea at his home and not too long thereafter started the tradition of Sunday Candlelight Suppers which are now held from time to time at many International Houses. However, these suppers soon outgrew his house and over the next several years more and more space was needed for them and for other functions organized for foreign

students. Eventually the Intercollegiate Cosmopolitan Club was formed, funded in part by the Dodge family, one of the leaders in the copper industry. In 1920, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was invited to be a Sunday Supper speaker. As a result of this event, he and ►@

-<O his wife became interested in Edmonds' work with foreign students and agreed to fund the building of

the first International House on the upper West Side of New York. At a Sunday Supper in November, 1922, Rockefeller expressed the thought that has become the mission of International Houses: That Brotherhood May Prevail. The words "throughout the world" were added later. He said that peace was the thing most craved for in the world, but that it depended on certain factors such as even-handed justice, universal good will implying kindness, tolerance, generosity, and many other qualities, not the least, brotherhood. The New York International House opened in 1924.

Even then, thought was being given to other places where International Houses. Berkeley, California, and Chicago were among these potential sites. The Berkeley House came first and was opened, in 1930.

After the Chicago House was built, other Rockefeller funded houses were built later in Paris and, after World War II, in Tokyo.

By 1927, a feasibility study was underway for an International House in Chicago. In May of that year, in a letter to John D. Rockefeller, Edmonds suggested that a building with some five-hundred rooms should

be built. He provided an estimate of $1,650,000 as the cost of the structure. He also offered some thoughts on what kind of staffing the House should have, and what their salary leve-ls might be. By 1929, the prospective costs had risen to $1,800,000 and possibly as high as

$1,975,000, still less than the cost to build the New York House. In addition, a figure of $240,000 was given for furnishings.

Given the go-ahead, a site was picked on 59th Street between Dorchester and Blackstone Avenues. At the time, this site was occupied by the Del Prado Hotel, built for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. A recently published book about Hyde Park (1) shows the hotel as a five-story brick building occupying the entire block with a one-story fore-building (or sun porch) extending to the sidewalk. At the end of the 1920s, it was the home for some university faculty members, including Nobel Prize winner Albert Michelson. University guests also stayed there. But, according to Max Grinnell, the author of the book, the hotel was meant to be somewhat "temporary," and had "only one refectory and a small entertainment room." The University acquired the site, and by May, 1930,

it had been cleared. In the process of tearing down the building, it was found that an artesian well (sic) was located under it and some thought was given to whether it could be made use of but eventually it was capped.

The reasons cited for choosing the site were that the University's social and intellectual life were found

north of the Midway. Also, since most foreign students were graduate students, it was thought that they

would be cut off from participation in those activities if the building was south of the Midway. At the time, it also appeared that the University was going to use that area for the development of its College.

In Edmonds' view, the Chicago International House should not be a skyscraper. He suggested that the rooms should be 9 feet by 12 feet, a foot wider than New York's. In August, 1929, the architectural firm, Holabird and Root was approached to draw up plans. Tentative sketches were ready by February, 1930, and quickly had Rockefeller's approval. Edmonds, who continuously provided suggestions for the House, made a particular point that the building should have separate entrances for men and women to reassure foreign students that their cultural and social concerns

were being taken into account. Building contracts were finalized in December, 1930, and work was begun on January 12, 1931. The cornerstone was laid June 24, 1931. As part of the construction, steel trusses were erected. Various kinds of materials were used for the building: Indiana limestone, Minnesota granite for the steps, Tennessee marble, and terrazzo flooring. Roofing was slate, which was also used in the courtyard.

Retractable bronze gates were installed at various corridor intersections on the main floor. Cork lined the ice room and root cellar. The day-by-day progress and problems were recorded by daily reports indicating how many workers were·on the sit and what had been accomplished. They also gave a daily weather report.

While the building was being erected, Holabird and Root made a furniture proposal, and the University's Purchasing Agent made up lists of prospective suppliers. It was thought that the University, because of its considerable purchasing power, could obtain

the furniture more cheaply by buying directly. Bids for furniture were put out in December, 1931. le was estimated that each room would cost $230 to furnish.

Inspectors were sent out to each prospective supplier to inspect their premises and the quality of their goods.

In February, 1931, suggestions had been made for a fountain to be installed in the courtyard and for decorating the buildings entryways. J. M. Jonson,

a prominent Midwestern sculptor, was selected and suggested the motifs for the various sides. The first sketch for the fountain was submitted in

February,1932, and it was finalized by July. At first, a basin made entirely of marble was considered, but that was changed to marble and tile. The fountain was cast by the Coleman Bronze Company. A gentleman named Ernst von Amman, with offices at 8 East Huron Street, was hired in January, 1932, to advise about furnishing the common rooms. It was suggested that the Carnegie Foundation be approached to fund a library in the amount of $10,000, which was done and a grant was received. Also, in January, 1932, Ruth Bush offered to loan to the House a dozen antique maps which, until

A u f u Ill 11 0 0 7

recently, could still be seen in the main corridor. They are now in a room adjacent to the front entryway. A Board of Governors was selected. Its president was Charles Dewey; the Chairman of the House Committee was the father of our present Supreme Court Justice Stevens. The appointment of a Director was discussed and centered on Bruce Dickson. Dickson had come

to the University campus as the YMCA advisor, a parallel to Edmonds, and in 1919 had been appointed Advisor to Foreign Students. He started having Sunday Suppers, as in New York, in his home. In 1927 they were moved to Ida Noyes Hall when Julius Rosenwald began providing financial support. There is some suggestion that Mrs. Dickson was to be considered

a co-director. Mr. Dickson was given an 18-month appointment. One of the amusing di cussions in the Board minmes related to the existence of a Live Fish and Bait Shop at 6352 South Stony Island Avenue, where all day and all night drinking was in evidence and it was thought to be a menace to women.

It is amazing to think that the massive structure was completed by April 1, 1932, only a little more than fourteen months after construction started. In September, 1932, operation of the building was turned over to its newly appointed staff. As an aside, in 1933, the year of the Century of Progress

Exposition, the existence of International House seems to have raised some concern among area hotels that

it was competing unfairly with them. Except for its first year of operation, during the next several years the House apparently generated sufficient funds to start a building maintenance fund. But in some of the minutes of the Board of Governors meetings,

concern was expressed that, in the effort to provide the maintenance funds, the House was shortchanging its social and intellectual activities.

The intellectual life of the House during its early years seems to have been quite rich. The House had a director for cultural programs and another for social activities. Speakers included Clarence Darrow, Lorado Taft, Mortimer Adler, Arthur H. Compton, Kenneth Boulding, Clifton Utley, T. V. Smith, Fay Cooper-Cole,

and Melchior Palyi. Gerald Nye talked about war profits; Gertrude Stein gave a lecture. Lin Yutang and Hu Shi were guest speakers. Under the sponsorship of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a chamber music series was organiz d in 1937. Foreign movies were shown. There were poetry recitals, plays, language classes, bridge classes, student talks, ethnic carnivals, and trips to performances and other places of interest. Teas, Sunday ers, and dances offered opportunities for socializing.

1. Grinnell, Max. Hyde Park, Illinois. Chicago, Arcadia Press, 2002.

Future articles will trace the history of International House from 1932 until present.

Black willow tree in Washington Park

Architectural Photography Exhibit, August 17 - September 15, 2007

For four weeks, from August 17 until September 15, 2007, Hyde Parkers were able to view some remarkable photographs at the Society's Headquarters. The photographs were part of a program entitled, "Buildings Brought to Film '07: Docwnentary Architectural Photography," and were taken by students in the summer, 2007, Documentary Architectural Photography clas at the School of the

Art Institute of Chicago. The class was taught by Kirk Gittings and Timothy Wittman.

Although the title indicated a major focus on buildings, viewers were pleased to see images of parks, trees, even railroad tracks and vacant lots. Eunice Kwan detailed the artistry of brick walls and ironwork. Ben Roberts photographed magnificent trees, including the black willow shown above. He also exhibited shots of notable buildings, including the Wrigley Building.

Soo Yeon Lee was enchanted by statue of George

Washington on horseback at the northwest approach to Washington Park. Christine Bang demonstrated her talents in capturing the essence of old and new buildings. Robbie Shymanski showed skill in photographing the atypical-an abandoned electrical substation on Prairie Avenue and a south side

vacant lot.

Visitors to the Society's headquarters were fortunate to have these works available for an extended period at the end of the summer.

l\u un111 2 0 0 7

CorneI I and Despres Award Nominations due November 15, 2007

Members of the Hyde Park Historical Society are invited to submit nominations for the 2007 Paul Cornell Awards and the Leon and Miriam Despres Awards, which will be presented at the annual dinner of the Society in early 2008. The Cornell Awards, named after Hyde Park's founder, recognize individuals and organizations whose work exemplify the values and objectives of the Society. This includes recording Hyde Park's histary, preserving Hyde Park artifacts and documents, and promoting public interest in Hyde Park history, and ducation.

Despres Awards are given for preserving the built environment, including renovation and reconstruction of homes, historical buildings, and other architectural structures.

Please send names and addresses of nominees for Cornell Awards to the Hyde Park Historical, 5529 S. Lake Park Avenue, Chicago, IL 60615,

wwwhydeparkhistory.org, or to Frances Vandervoort, 5471 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60615, Tel: (773) 752-8374, or by e-mail: vandersand@sbcglobal.net. Send Despres-Award nomination to-rhe Hyde Par

Historical Society or to Jack Spicer, 5536 S. Kim bark Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, Tel: (773) 324-5476, ore mail: jackspicer@earthlink.net. All nominations must be received by November 15, 2007.

Elizabeth Borst,

1912-2007

Longtime Hyde Parker and Historical Society member Elizabeth Ann Jones Borst died last month at age 93. A 1929 graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory School, Ms. Borst graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree

in 1933. She began but never completed a master's degree from the University's School of Social Service Administration, instead going directly to work for Chicago Relief Administration and Hyde Parks Chicago Child Care Society.

Ms. Borst loved music and regulary played her Yamaha upright piano for friends and fellow residents at Montgomery Place, where she lived until her death. Her family donated her piano to the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club.

A memorial service for Ms. Borst was held at Montgomery Place on September 15.

The Russians come to Chicago-in 1893

Frances S. Vandervoort

Recently, during a visit my husband and I made to northern Russia as part of an expedition to the North Atlantic, we chanced to visit Archangelsk, once an important industrial and shipping center where the Dvina River empties into the White Sea. A tour of this city of 350,000 took us to an art museum where a particular painting caught our eye. The painting was a bleak scene of a small group of Siberian exiles clustered around the window of a house in a wintry forest. Illuminated only by a candle on the windowsill and starlight reflected from the snow, the men were furtively eating bits of bread and sipping water left for them by the homeowner, who obviously had more sympathy for them than the autocratic regime that had sent them on their long journey.

The museum's guide tald us that the painting had left Archangelsk only once, in 1893. That year the painting was in Chicago, gracing the walls of the Palace of Fine Arts in Jackson Park. Fair visitors saw it in Chicago in 1893; these Hyde Parkers saw it in Russia this summer.

A u f u Ill n 0 0 7

Local History Fair

\/vinners Present at the Society's Headquarters

On July 28, 2007, Society members had the opportunity to see prize-winning history projects of local high school students. Students representing their projects were Stephen Beemsterboer of Walter Payton High School, whose project was entitled, H. H. Holmes: Tragedy of the World's Fair Fiend. Stephen's project was prepared for a compact disc.

Loren Alohan's project, Daniel Hale Williams, and Brienne Lacoste's project, Trumbull Park Riots, were also available for viewers' interest.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATHY HUFF

Loren Alohan

Brienne Lacoste

Stephen Beemsterboer

A u l I.I Ul II 0 0 7

Tribute to Frederick

••••••••••••••••

Douglass proposed for Jackson Park

If all goes as planned, a collaborative effort between the School of Leadership of South Shore High School and the Chicago Park District will result in a commemorative marker honoring abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.

Plans call for an engraved boulder to be installed near the present Lawn Bowling Court in Jackson Park just north of the 59th Street harbor, the precise location of the Haitian Pavilion of the 1893 Columbian World Exposition. This project, which began more than

two years ago, credits Douglass for his leadership and commitment to the quest for knowledge and will give Chicagoans a more inclusive historical perspective about the activities of this great leader.

Douglass, appointed the Minister-in-Charge of the Haitian Pavilion, gave the dedication address on January 2, 1893, Haitian Independence Day.

HPHS members are encouraged to express support for this project by writing to Adrian Guerrero, Department of External Affairs, Chicago Park District, 541 Fairbanks Court, Chicago, IL 60611. FAX: (312) 742-6098.

IMPORTANT: Mr. Guerrero stresses that all letters should be received by late September, wl en the r view committee will meet.

HPHS Board's Position on the Illinois Central Hospital

In late June HPHS President Bradford sent a letter to Fifth Ward Alderman Hairston spelling out the Society's position on preserving the Illinois Central Hospital building, designed by architect Richard Schmidt and built in 1916.

In the letter she points out that, "The building was a pioneer effort in the evolution of the 'progressive hospital design movement,' and is a strong visual feature of Hyde Park ... (It) is in good condition and does not pose a threat to public safety." In conclusion, she writes that the Society " ... would not object to a reasonable redevelopment of the site that includes the reuse of the historic hospital building, but (requests) that any new building be of a high architectural quality in keeping with the standards already set by Hyde Park's historic and modern architecture."

Society Welcomes •

• New Archivist

• Michal Safar, Hyde Park resident since 1984, has assumed the role of Archivist for

the Hyde Park Historical Society. Michal has a degree in English literature from Butler University, Indianapolis, and received her Master of Arts in Library Science from Rosary College (now Dominican University)

• She has pursued various professional •

interests including work as a university

librarian, consultant to the Defense Logistics Agency Reseach and Development Division, and editor of a newsletter for the Industrial Technology and Management Department

of the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is married to Mazin Safar, a graduate

of the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago and Industrial Professor at IIT.

Steve Treffman, who previously served as the Society's Archivist and has spoken with Michal at length, describes her as, "an unusually competent person and I think people on the Board and members of the Society will be very pleased to have her

• involved with the work of the Society."

She has made the following statement

regarding this position:

• The Archives Committee is in the process of locating, organizing and archiving HPHS

records including meeting minutes, financial records, bylaws and any other documents generated by the Society. This process would be much easier if we could get digital files (Word documents, spreadsheets, pdf files, PowerPoint files) of these records. If you have any of these types of records, please email them to the Chair of the Archives Committee, Michal Safar, at msafar@ ameritech. net.

••••••••••••••••

A u l 11 HI n 0 0 7

Paul Cornell, 89

Paul Cornell, grandson of Paul Cornell, the "Father of Hyde Park," died May 24, 2007, in Naples, Florida.

He was born in Chicago, was a veteran of World War II, graduated from Duke University, and made a career in economics, oil shale technology, gold, property (in Hyde Park), and electrical technology and manufacturing.

Numerous patents were registered in his name. He spent many years living in California,

Switzerland, and Ireland, where he and his wife, Patricia, restored an historic Irish house in County Waterford before settling in Naples in 1996. He was a keen sportsman, and was known as an expert sailor, shot, and fly fisherman.

He will be remembered for his remarkable intellect, his courtesy, charm, and unfailing optimism. He is survived by his son, Paul V. Cornell, his daughter Lauren Mitchell, his son-in-law Adrian Mitchell, and three grandchildren. His wife preceded him in death.

Approximately thirty friends and family members

UPCOMING £VfNTS

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2007

The film, You Are Here, produced by the University of Chicago Civic Knowledge Project of the Division of Humanities, will be shown at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, 5480 South Kenwood Avenue, between 2:00 until 4:00 PM.

Wallace Goode, Associate Dean of Students and representative of the University's Office of Community Service will preside.

You Are Here is a fascinating account of events during the past 60 years that produced the

attended Paul Cornell's burial service in Oak Woods Cemetery on July 23, 2007.

(This article is excerpted from the obituary that appeared in a recent Hyde Park Herald)

anniversary. (See the article, "Internacional House of Chicago: A Short History," in this newsletter.)

These events will include Author Nights, with Rid1ard Dawkins on October 4, speaking about his latest book, The God Delusion, and James Watson, discoverer of the genetic code, speaking on October 8 about his book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Other events include conferences about migration and human rights (October 12-13), a"China Symposium" (January 26, 2008), and various musical events. For further information, check Internacional House's web site: http://ihouse.uchicago.edu.

Hyde Park familiar to us all. The film shows

the tumultuous years of the S0s and before,

the beginnings of urban renewal and ensuing tensions, and the rapid changes of the 60s. The film shows how Hyde Park struggled for stability while at the same time recognizing the need for change. The result, of course, is the dynamic community we know today.

AUTUMN QUARTER, INTERNATIONALHOUSE 75TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

The world-famous Internacional House of the

Universi cy of Chicago will hold a series oflectures and ocher events to commemorate its 75th

HPNC: SAVE THEDATE!

Mark your calendars for Hyde Park Neighborhood Club's First Annual Health & Wellness Fair, Healthy Mind+ Healthy Body= Healthy You!, October 27. This will be a debut event for community members, health professionals, & civic & senior-focused organizations interested in proactive health. The day will include a brain health plenary with leading experts from the field, lunch (available by request), hearing, diabetes, and muscle maintenance breakout workshops, & a closing panel about a Lifetime of Health. For more information, contact:Jessica Blake (773) 643-4062, xlS or jtblake@hpnclub.org.

Aulumn 2007

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Volume 3, Number 1 February, 1981

SEVEN PAUL COR'NELL AWARDS PRESENTED

By Adrian Alexander

On Saturday January 17, 171 members of the Society gathered at International House to celebrate the accomplish ments of the past year. It was a jolly evening.

This third annual meeting and dinner was highlighted by the presentation of our Paul Cornell Awards. Betty Davey, chairman of the nominating committee, made the presenta tio_(ls, as follows:

o Hans and Kathy Morsbach and Stephen and Marieanne Thomas won awards for the exterior renovation of their houses.

;_ o The Ancona School was honored for its annual com munity house tours. Mrs. Douglas Straus accepted the aw.ard·.

·o For its Hyde Park-Kenwood tours, popular city-wide, the Chicago Architecture Foundation also received an award. Marian Despres accepted it.

o The award made to the Hyde Park-Kenwood Communi ty Conference for its garden tour last summer was ac cepted by Mae Hodge, who organized that event.

o Also honored was Wallace P. Rusterholtz, for his book,

The First Unitarian Society of Chicago-A Brief History.

o And, finally, the award given to the Board of Directors of the Chicago Public Library for the restoration of the Blackstone Branch was accepted by Camille Hatzenbueh ler, president of the board.

Congratulations to all I

1980 In Review

Retiring president Clyde Watkins, in his State of the So ciety message, reviewed the events of the past year. With the added exposure at booths during the City House Exposition at Navy Pier and the 57th St. Art Fair, membership in the Society reached the 400 mark. The opening of the restored cable car station on Lake Park as our headquarters was the most satisfying accomplishment of the year. That occasion was celebrated by a parade through the neighborhood and the opening of the exhibit "Hyde Park Politics 1861-1919". Watkins also noted the importance of the publication of the Society's first two books, Hyde Park History No. 1 and Hyde Park History No 2, and reviewed the broad interest range of seven programs of the year, consisting of lectures and tours.

All 171 diners held their breath expectantly while Bea Boehm and Clyde Watkins pulled raffle tickets out of a giant brandy snifter. Twelve people won a bottle of wine and a bottle of Scotch and Margaret Fallers' "lucky thirteen" winner's prize was a pair of cowboy boots. The $200 netted

Bob Ashenhurst and his "Chamber Choir": Kevin Butler, Helen Bailey, David Currie. Photo by HONard Jackson.

by the raffle was added to the building completion fund, still short of its goal [See additional story, page 3.]

As is their way, Ned Rosenheim (words) and Bob Ashen hurst (music) contributed in high style to the evening's mer riment. Helen Bailey, Kevin Butler and David Currie gave voice to the song, "How Delightful to Live in Hyde Park", enumerating the pleasures of l fe in our neighborhood and reminding us that but for the grace of God we might be stuck in some such place as Berkeley or even Wilmette. "Musical Notes on Hyde Park Notables" destroyed the hubris of current residents by reminding us that in the good old days, Hyde Park was home to the illustrious likes of Paul Cornell, Lorado Taft, and Charles Merriam.

Satire from "Sybil Dibble"

Between the two songs-described by her as having been performed by the "24th Legislative District Chamber Choir"-Mary Schulman adopted the persona of one Sybil Dibble and lectured the assemblage on "APRIL in Hyde Park." She explained that APRIL "is an acrobat, or whatever they call it" for The Association for Preservation, Renovation, Innovation and Litigation. Her speech was a profound expli cation of the evangelical ethic of social responsibility in an urban neighborhood. She left us with the unchallengeable assertion that "APRIL is the coolest bunch in Hyde Park."

All evening the conversations around the dinner tables ex pressed gratitude for the efforts of those movers and shakers of the Board who have brought the Hyde Park Historical Society to such a happy state of affairs.

Profile of Ted Anderson

He Likes to Fix Things Up, Play Trombone, and Sing

NOTE: Thelma Dahlberg is the chairman of the Society's Oral History Project.

By Thelma Dahlberg

Many of us know A.T. (Ted) Anderson as a respected, suc cessful Hyde Park merchant and community leader, but few of us know how he became so capable and why he is so likeable. An Oral History taping, done just before he moved to Hawaii, gives us some of his secrets: '

Ted had only one job in his entire lifetime. He went to work at age ten as a delivery boy for Henry Kayner, a hard ware merchant on 55th St. He stayed there through another ownership and in 1935, with financial help from his mother, bought the business.

"I struggled, worked days and nights, did lots of repair work, for 55 years" is how he sums it up.

The Fix-It Route to Profit

During the 1930's he supplemented his stock by buying damaged and returned merchandise from the A.C. McClurg Co., usually $100 worth at a time. "The potential was tremen dous", he recalls. "One time I bought 75 broken ironing boards. I th ink I paid 25 cents a piece for them. I must have gotten 50 or 60 good ones out of the 75, by replacing legs

or bolts or something. Fixed up, they brought $5.00 each. It was worth it. I had to do things like that to get merchan dise to sell."

It took Ted five years to get through Hyde Park High School. That was because he spent most of his time and energy doing what he liked most, taking courses in the forge and foundry, machine, and wood shops. "I used to get 'S' in shop courses, but to study and write reports... there I didn't do so well," he says. He usually left the school shops at 5 PM, then hurried to the store to make his deliveries.

He Makes Music Too

Music has been important in Ted's life. He played the trom bone in the school band for four years and was chosen to go to Interlachen one summer. He didn't go, he preferred to stay in Chicago and work in the store. He says, "I've played in a lot of bands and orchestras. I enjoyed it. My son inherited the horn, and now he has bought one for his son, so the trombone tradi tion is still in the family." Ted also likes to sing; he's been a member of his church choir for many years.

Even after he sold his business and supposedly was retired, Hyde Parkers continued to call on him for help during emer gencies. Ted continued to repair, advise, replace. "I don't mind doing things if I'm capable of doing them," he says. "I hate to refuse anyone, particularly when they're in trouble

... Hyde Park has been good to me."

You have been good to Hyde Park, Ted. We wish you many years of the good life in Hawaii. We doubt that you'll "retire" there, though. Every day you'll be fixing something for some one in need of your help. It's your nature.

OUR HEADQUARTERS BUILDING is available for activi ties such as lectures, meetings, or social events (except chil drens' birthday parties) given by members of the Hyde Park Historical Society or organizations with which they are af filiated. Pass the word.

Here are the rules:

1. The Hyde Park Historical Society reserves the right to refuse any rental request, especially if in our judgment, the proposed use might damage the building.

2. The basic fee is $50, but may be increased if the Society must help with preparations or cleanup.

3. For a lecture or meeting, occupancy must be limited to 65 people; for a reception, to 100 people; for a din ner, to 50 people.

4. Renters must agree to be responsible for any damage

to the building, fixtures or furniture which occurs during their occupancy.

5. The chairman of the Headquarters Rental Committee can request payment in advance and/or a security de posit.

Until April 1, anyone interested in renting the building should call Devereux Bowly at 667-2244 (home phone). After April 1, call Alta Blakely at 684-2784.

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HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN to renew your membership? Do it now and don't miss out on 1981 programs, activities, and the Ne;,...,sletter. Send a check for $10, drawn to the Hyde Park Historical Society, to our new membership chairman, Ms.

Randy Holgate, 6044 Ingleside Ave., Chicago 60637.

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, the Chicago Historical Society has denied access to its 1882-1953 file of Hyde Park Heralds because the paper on which they are printed has become so brittle. Now-good newsl-the Herald's publisher, Bruce Sagan, is paying for the microfilming of the archive. Although some years are missing, to be able once again to use this material will be a great help to local researchers.

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VOLUNTEERS ARE NEEDED to staff our Headquarters on Saturdays from 10 A.M. to noon and Sundays from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M. If you can help, call Anita Anderson at 363-5252.

2-February, 1981

Another $2,000 Will Complete Headquarters

By Clyde Watkins

Prior to the dedication of our Headquarters in October, we achieved our campaign goal of $40,000. This allowed us to proceed uninterrupted on the renovation and restoration work, now completed.

In addition to more than 100 Charter Memberships at $100 each-and a wealth of other gifts from individual members and friends of the Society-our campaign benefitted greatly from substantial grants made by the following foundations and cor porations: the Field Foundation of Illinois ($10,000). the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation ($5,000). the Joyce Foundation ($2,500), the Continental Bank Foundation ($2,500), and the Hyde Park Bank and Trust Company ($1,000).

play cases, a stationmaster's desk and chair, and an operating wood-burning stove. Drop by and stoke it up with us some Saturday (10 AM to noon) or Sunday (2 to 4PM)!

Needed: $4,000 More

Despite all this success, we found that in order to complete our original restoration plans, we would have to raise an addi tional $4,000. These funds are needed to cover the final work

-already done-on the building, and to acquire furnishings

for the interior.

With the contributions received in response to our year end appeal, plus the proceeds from the raffle at the annual meeting, the "Completion Fund" now stands at just under

$2,000. Thus, we are nearing the halfway mark. If you haven't yet made a contribution, it will be much appreciated.

Efforts to reach our goal will continue, after which our lily should be all but gilded and we can take a well-deserved fund-raising rest.

Incidentally, several recent additions have been made to the interior of the Headquarters-some contributed directly

-which you should stop in and see. We now have three au thentic railroad waiting room benches, two merchandise dis-

WINNERS & LOSERS

To complement our exhibit on Hyde Park Politics, Leon Despres arranged a meeting of the Society in November, at which Robert Merriam reminisced about his 1947 campaign for 5th Ward alderman. Good tales:

o At one point, Walter Johnson-exasperated by Merriam's lofty intellectual approach-said to him, "Those are beautiful speeches you're making, but they're awful."

o Merriam's opponent was the incumbent, Bertram Moss. Four days before the election the ward was flooded with facsimiles of LIFE magazine re-named WIN, which urged retention of Moss. Gossip said the brochures had cost at least $12,000. Where had the money come from? Voters were so suspicious they elected Merriam.

And speaking of old-time politics, we have just counted ballots recently dropped into the antique ballot box at Head quarters. "Shall Hyde Park be annexed to Chicago?" was the question. In 1889, people in the Village Center (modern Hyde Park) were anti-annexation but residents of adjacent com munities outvoted them. In the 1980 replay, presumably with only Village Center votes being cast, the outcome was the same: 39 people were for annexation, 69 were against it.

Silent Night, Holy Night, Frigid Night: Community Carol Sing a Great Success

NOTE: The Community Carol Sing was the idea of Rory Shanley-Brown. Below, she describes it.

By Rory Shanley-Brown

On December 19, with the temperature registering near zero, the Society-in cooperation with the Chicago Children's Choir, the First Unitarian Church, Rockefeller Chapel, St. Thomas the Apostle Church and the Lab School Choirs initiated what we hope will become an annual tradition, a neighborhood caroling party.

Over 200 people attended, ranging in age from senior citi zens to toddlers being carried in back packs. First, we gathered in St. Thomas' sanctuary. With its blazing advent candles,

it appeared warm and inviting. After a rousing practice, di rected by Chris Moore, we gathered forces-plus our gloves, scarves, and down jackets-and marched along 55th St. to the central courtyard of University Park Condominiums. It was fun to see the expressions on the faces of passersby as they observed this ragtag but joyous procession.

High Spirits, Low Temperatures

Spirits seemed to catch fire as we caroled in the courtyard.

The windows were filled with smiling faces and the glow of lights from Christmas trees. Some people even braved the cold to come out and join us. Finally, dropping temperatures forced many of the group to retreat to the Neighborhood Club for cocoa and cookies. The more hearty continued caroling.

At the Neighborhood Club, the spirit overcame us again and we had another round of song. But as the clock moved toward 10 o'clock we called a regretful halt to the evening-feeling warm and Christmasy and, most importantly, part of a very special occasion in a very special community.

February, 1981-3

Gary Commuter Discovers A

Local Catch-22 Situation

As all HPHS members know, our headquarters building on Lake Park Ave. was originally a cable car station. That's what it·must still look like, despite its having "Hyde Park Historical Society" lettered in gold over its door. Here's why we think so:

One quiet Saturday, when Betty and John Davey were "tending the shop" at Headquarters, a taxi drew up and a man leaped out and ran into the building. He threw down some money said, "Quick! Give me a ticket to Gary I"

Now, by making a phone call anyone can learn that the

South Shore train uses the I .C. tracks and stops at 57th Street to pick up passengers for Indiana destinations. Having that in formation is the merest beginning, however.

Next, one must know that it is impossible to get a ticket for the South Shore line at the 57th St. I.C. station. It must be purchased on the train.

But you can't do that unless you can get up the stairs onto the platform where the train stops.

And access to the stairs is controlled by the street-level turnstyle. That apparatus, designed to swing open when an

I.C. ticket is thrust into it, can also be activated by remote control from I .C. headquarters. A South Shore rider is sup posed to use the "house" phone on the wall by the door to re quest such service. Or he can take an illegal shortcut and climb over the turnstyle and its adjacent railings.

The Daveys explained all this to their prospective traveler to Gary. They saw him start toward the station but do not know whether he caught the train-or, for that matter, whether he had enough energy and persistence even to try.

February, 1981-4

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ltlt®IT

Volume 3, Number 2 May, 1981

FOR 132 YEARS, IT'S PROVIDED CHILDREN LOVING CARE

NOTE: At our meeting and tour of the Chicago Child Care Society on April 5, its retired director, Marion Obenhaus, re viewed the institution's history. Here is a brief summary.

By Ida B. DePencier

In 1849, Chicago was outgrowing its boots. During the previous decade, the population had increased enormously. The people who came by land from Eastern states went around the south end of Lake Michigan to Chicago. Those who came by boat disembarked in Chicago. This was the jumping-off place for travel farther west. Not all continued the journey, as Chicago provided oppor tunities for many kinds of labor. There was much coming and going.

Westward Ho! for Cholera too

In the East, a cholera epidemic was raging. It spread west with the travelers and many children were orphaned. There was no place for them except in poor houses or jails. When President John Ty ler proclaimed August 4 a national day of prayer, the minister of Chicago's First Baptist Church asked his congregation to remain after services to discuss what

TURN OF THE CENTURY Kindergarten class at the,Chicago Orphan Asylum.

AN EDITORIAL

Rosenwald House: What Next?

could be done.

Acting on need and emergency, these concerned citizens then and there formed an organization, raised the money, and by August 7 had a house at Lake and South Water Streets. By August 11, a board had been formed, generous donors

had given more money, and the home was in operation.

There were so many requests for places for orphan children that more houses were purchased until there were four in all. Four months later, they

got their charter and their name: the Chi cago Orphan asylum, a name by which they would be known until 1949.

continued on page 2

Several years ago a controversy raged over whether the developer who owns the historic Rosenwald House at 4901 Ellis should be permitted to divide it into three condominium units, one on each floor. Many Kenwood residents objected to the plan, believing that making an ex ception to the single-family home zoning of the area would set an undesirable pre cendent.

Members of the Committee to Save the Rosenwald House argued that the condominium plan was the best way to save the house, which has 22 rooms and 17,000 sq. ft. of space, and has not been occupied by a single family since the Rosenwalds moved away more than 50 years ago.

Within recent months, Kenwood has been designated a landmark district by the City Council. Consequently, requests for building permits there must now be reviewed by the Commission on Histori· cal and Architectural Landmarks. Also, the wrecking permit once held by the developer has lapsed and his efforts to renew it have failed. The vacant house is deteriorating.

Successful conversion of mansions into luxury condominium units has occurred locally from the Gold Coast to Lake Forest, in many other cities, and even on TV. [See page 3.) The HPHS Board of Directors suggests that it may be time for the community to again consider the future of the Rosenwald House.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Asylum's Founders Themselves Did Whatever Needed Doing

The city continued to grow and the need for a place for orphaned children grew with it. In 1853, a large building accommodating 200 children was erected at 22nd and Michi gan, a location that was 'way out in the country.' It was used until 1890. At that time, a building and some brick cottages were erected at 51st and South Park. These served until 1929.

Personal Philanthropy

When the Chicago Orphan Asylum was established, a responsible group of influential men became trustees. They managed the finances. The women managed the institution. They made the houses attractive, supervised the medical care, feeding and clothing. The Asylum had its ow11 school; in fact, one of the earliest kindergartens in the city was located there. [See photo on preceding page.] The Ladies Board met every Tuesday morning from 1849 to 1930. They decided who should be admitted and interviewed families who wished to take orphans.

Changes were coming about. By the 1920's and 1930's, fewer children were coming to the Asylum and a reappraisal

of its mission was obviously needed. Ethel Verry, who came to the Asylum with a background in Child Development, made a study which resulted in a decision to sell the property at 51st and South Park and place the children in foster homes. An office was opened on Lake Park Ave. in Hyde Park. In ensuing years, it had several locations. In 1963, the Child Care Society moved into the present building at 55th and University.

And 132 Years After Its Birth?

In 1849, the purpose was to care for destitute and or phaned children. In 1981, the adoption and foster care of children continues, plus counseling of parents, a rich day care program, plus research, teaching, and training of social work ers.

WELCOME MAT OUT! All Hyde Park Historical Society members can help to familiarize more people with the So ciety, its location and its activities. We hope each of you will do either or both of the following:

oYourself bring a couple of friends to our Headquarters and personally show them around. In addition to an historical ex hibit, there are books and attractive merchandise for sale.

o As part of the program of other organizations to which you belong, arrange for its mini-tour of HPHS Headquarters. Do this soon, while the exhibit on Hyde Park Politics is still on view, and again in June, when a new exhibit (see page

4 for details) will open.

Hours are 10 AM to 12 Noon on Saturdays; 2 PM to 4PM on Sundays; or by appointment. In the latter case, call Emma Kemp at the Blackstone Library, 624-0511.

AGAIN THIS YEAR, we expect to offer an excursion by bus to the Chicago Historical Society's Fourth of July celebra tion. Details will come to you in due course.

THANKS ARE DUE to the United Church of Hyde Park for contributing to our archival collection a 1901 issue of The Society Times, featuring the Arche' Club; rare photos of the Congregational Church and a history of that church; pictures and programs of the Methodist Church; and a history of the Presbyterian Church. (Over the years, these congregations combined to form the United Church.)

Hyde Park Historical Society archives are housed in Regen stein Library's Department of Special Collections. Lists of their contents are available both in Special Collections and at HPHS Headquarters.

P.S. To mark its 125th birthday in 1974, the Society commissioned former Hyde Parker Clare McCausland to write a history of the institution. Entitled Children of Circumstance (and highly readable), it is available for $3.95 from the Chica go Child Care Society at 5467 University Avenue, Chicago IL. 60637.

SEMINARS ON HISTORIC PRESERVATION

"Adaptive use" is the big thing in historic preservation cir cles, and there's a fine example of it in Mt. Carroll, Illinois. The campus and buildings of defunct Shimer College are now the Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies.

A series of two to five day seminars will take place there on topics as varied as textile conservation, the character of historic house paints, and how to clean masonry-between mid-May and mid-November. For the course schedule, write Campbell Center, Box 66, Mt. Carroll, IL 61053.

WINDOW BOXES may soon be a-bloom in front of Head quarters. The Hyde Park-Kenwood Garden Fair Committee has offered to supply the plant materials for window boxes which Dev Bowly is making.

2-May, 1981

PBS Superstar Bob Vila Wows 'Em at Qty House

NOTE: The City House Exposition was held this year in late March at McCormick Place West. Our reporter attended the most popular program of the weekend and here describes it.

By Lesley Bloch

Preceded by architect William Bauhs, rehab specialist Al bert Nickele and contractor Brian Doherty, in bounded the best of Thursday night TV: Bob Vila. He arrived uncharac teristically well dressed and was greeted with flash bulbs ex ploding from all angles, vigorous clapping from occupants of tightly-ordered chairs, and a standing-room-only crowd.

His reason for being at City House instead of on location in Newton was his position as moderator of a panel discus

sion entitled "Getting It Together: A Rehab Plan and Working with Professionals."

Best Advice: Plan Far Ahead

As all fans of This Old House would agree, if anyone knows the answers to rehab problems, it is Bob Vila. Although the three other men made valid statements from which I duti fully took notes, for me as for most of the audience, B.V. was the star. He began the discussion by asking the others if they thought the prospective rehabber should make a list of "must do" and "would like to do" projects? All three said yes indeed; when doing jobs from the first list it is wise to consider what plans you have for later. Think ahead. Will the rejuiced furnace send its warmth to the greenhouse? Is the electrical system safe? Is the foundation sound? "Don't price yourself out of the neighborhood", Vila warned," and don't expect the next owner to be willing to pay for your choice

of pink bathroom tile."

The second part of the program dealt with working with professionals and how to find them. Vila began by saying, "First off, you should make friends with a banker. The visuali zation of hard cash is all-important". Finding an architect-

either for consultation or to create an actual plan-is the next step. This can lead to a contractor.

"Who Helped You?"

How does one find these people? Vila suggested you look at houses that have recently been renovated. Go to the door, ring the bell and confront the owner with praise and the question, "Who helped you?" Since this person has invested a great deal of money in improving the house, he or she is quite proud and should be most helpful. William Bauhs mentioned that the new field of low-budget architectural work interests many firms these days. Brian Doherty added that there are contractors who are willing to have the owner work alongside or do some of the preliminary labor.

The program ended with Bob Vila assuring us that he'll re turn to City House next year and that he hopes "to bring Norm along". He says that TV plans for the future are indefi nite, but he's thinking of renovating a small apartment build ing in Boston as a departure from the current series on con verting to condominiums the Richardson-designed estate in Newton, Mass. (Incidentally, the ice house section is priced at $125,000; the woodshed at $150,000.)

Bob Vila's and Jane Davidson's book, This Old House, paperbound and with many pictures, is available for $14.95 at another Richardson-designed building, Chicago's Glessner House, 1800 Prairie Avenue.

From the Tribune, July 31, 1887

Old ladies confined in the Old Ladies Home were given their annual ride through the South Parks and picnic Friday afternoon. Captain White, Superintendent of the Parks, ten dered the use of the park phaetons for the afternoon, and about 1 o'clock several of them called for the ladies. They were driven over the Boulevards to Jackson Park where they picnicked at the Twin Lakes. Each was given a bouquet.

WHO CREATED THESE SCULPTURES? WHERE ARE THEY WCATED?

These are two of the pictures shown by Carol Solomon in her engrossing lec ture at Headquarters on May 13.

Near right: Cosmo Compoli's "Guard ing the Nest" (a.k.a. "Egg in the Park"). It was installed in 1970, thanks to the Park Sculpture Committee of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, in the park between St. Thomas The Apostle Church and the Neighborhood Club.

Far right: Richard Hunt's "Why?", a memorial to long-time Business School professor Sam Nerlove (from his wife and son). It was installed in 1974 in the inner quadrangle facing Harper Library. The twin of this bronze is at UCLA, where Nerlove taught after he retired from the University of Chicago.

May, 1981-3

Work of Blue Sky Press To Be Featured in Our New Exhibit

To coincide with the weekend of the 57th St. Art Fair, the Hyde Park Historical Society will open a new exhibit a retrospective show devoted to Douglas Wilson's and Peter Kruty's collection of works from the Blue Sky Press. This firm, which flourished in Hyde Park from 1899 to 1907, is a fine example of the Arts and Crafts Movement in America.

Wine and Cheese Reception

The exhibit's grand opening will be combined with a wine and cheese reception for Wilson and Kruty. and is scheduled for Thursday, June 4, at Headquarters, from 5 PM to 7 PM. Mark the event on your calendar now. Also, make a point of inviting your art-loving friends to see the exhibit on their way to or from the 57th St. Art Fair. We expect to keep Head quarters open longer than usual that weekend, in fact match ing the Art Fair hours of noon to dusk.

Down with the Machine!

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a late 19th century protest against the social, moral and cultural chaos which ac companied the Industrial Revolution. Its practitioners hated the machine and the mass production it fostered, and tried not only to revive handcrafts but also to persuade manufacturers to design for them. Alas, the Movement did not prevail. By 1910, the machine was triumphant in all the Western nations.

IDEALISTIC young writers, designers and printers banded together in Hyde Park to produce fine books typical of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

May, 1981-4

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

N®w Il®ttlt®IT

Volume 3, Number 3 August, 1981

JAPANESE GARDEN ON WOODED ISLAND DONE AT LAST!

By Lee H. Morgan

"A magnificent addition to the park. The $400,000 cost was worth every pen ny." So said the Hyde Park Herald.

"It has more than lived up to my hopes." So said George Cooley, whose idea it was-an idea the Hyde Park His torical Society saluted in 1979 by giving Cooley our Paul Cornell Award.

"It", of course, is the new Japanese Garden on Wooded lsland-"the best Ja anese garden I've seen outside of Ja pan", according to that country's Dep uty Consul General, Toshiro Ogushi.

Gala Dedication Day

This replacement for the similar garden installed originally for the 1893 World's Fair was dedicated by Mayor Byrne on June 21, highlight of a day-long festival of cultural and social events sponsored

by Hyde Park, Woodlawn and South Shore organizations.

The garden, serene and lovely (at least initially), features rock formations and a waterfall, kasugi and yukimi lanterns, a half-circle "Moon Bridge" and a perform ing arts pavillion.

If the Park District honors its promise

Visitors inspect Japanese Garden on dedication day. Nancy Hays photo,

courtesy of Hyde Park Herald.

Venerable Hyde Park Club Disbands

to provide adequate surveillance, the garden may remain as pleasant a retreat as it was meant to be. Better go see it soon.

George Cooley, right, with Bonsai specialist Ivan Watters. Nancy Hays photo, courtesy Hyde Park Herald.

By Ruth Grodzins

The Hyde Park Travel Club officially disbanded-at age 93-in April. It was the third oldest women's organization in Chi cago; only The Fortnightly and the Chica go Women's Club preceded it.

Founded in 1888, the group had met weekly at the Windermere since 1927. A former president, Harriet Hatch, cited "changing life styles in today's women" as a reason for the Club's demise. She also said, "Working women and busy mothers do not have time until retirement to de vote to the Club."

Founded by a Man

A man, Prof. Charles S. Farrar, or ganized the Club in November, 1888. Its original name was "Ladies' Travel Class" and Farrar ran its program of lectures for 10 years, when he was succeeded by Agnes

Ingersoll. In 1913 it was renamed the Hyde Park Travel Club, and by 1915 its original complement of 91 members had grown to 250.

Gifts to Our Society

The Travel Club's last days were un der the aegis of Frederica Marston. Mi nutes, documents and archives have been presented to the Chicago Historical So ciety. The group's remaining funds were distributed among various philanthropical organizations, including the Hyde Park His torical Society, whose share was $400.

We also received the banner which was always displayed at their meetings; a handsomely carved wooden standard, now on view at our Headquarters; and an old gavel, shaped rather like a tomahawk.

Our president plans to use this awesome object at our future meetings.

Leon Hurwitz's Life A Saga Of High Drama, Hard Work

By Thelma Dahlberg Chairman, Oral History Project

Who in Hyde Park was born in the Ukraine, educated in Warsaw, and has a saber scar on his throat? When we add that this man knows the name of all his regular customers, many will recognize Leon Hurwitz, 84, owner of Wright Laun dry on 57th Street. He bought the laundry in 1929-the third owner since it was started in 1890 by Arthur Wright, on land where the Ray School now stands.

Mr. Hurwitz is patriotic and public-spirited. During World War 11, when there was a Navy contingent on the University of Chicago campus, he gave free service to sailors who picked up their laundry between 7 AM and 8:30 AM on Saturday mornings. "I was glad to do it", he says, "I had a son in the Navy, and I know what it meant."

One Army After Another

An account of Leon Hurwitz's early life is like a Dumas novel. He was in Germany, studying lens-making, when World War I broke out. He got to Petrograd by way of Scandinavia, then entered the Russian infantry. Wounded, he spent five weeks in the hospital. When released, he shifted to the cavalry. On the Austrian Front, he recalls, "I got in a hand-to-hand battle with a Hungarian cavalry man, he was trying to cut off my neck. Fortunately, I had on a uniform with a very high collar."

He returned to service after hospitalization but was taken prisoner in June 1917 and not released until after the war was over and the revolution had occurred. Upon returning home, he found that his father had been killed and the family scat tered. He finally located his mother and sister and took them to Warsaw. Almost at once, he was inducted into the Polish army. After serving five months, he obtained a fake passport to the free port of Danzig. From there he came to the United States, to Chicago, and eventually to Hyde Park.

The Beginnings of the Co-op

In 1932, Mr Hurwitz participated in the foundation of one of our most important institutions, the Hyde Park Co-op. Here is how he remembers it:

"The idea of a cooperative buying club was thought up during the Depression by two unemployed men [Brad Shank and his father] who lived above Woodworth's Bookstore. I

Continued on page 3

HEAR YE!

The Society's booth at this year's 57th St. Art Fair netted us 16 new members as well as $138.50 from the sale of our publications, stationery and other merchandise.

In coordination with the Art Fair's hours (noon to dusk, June 6 and 7), we kept Headquarters open so that fairgoers could see the current show, Douglas Wilson's and Peter Kruty's collection of books from the Blue Sky Press. Over 70 people stopped by and enjoyed this beautifully displayed exhibit.

HPHS members who manned either the Art Fair booth or Headquarters included Anita Anderson, Margaret Bevacqua, Alta Blakely, Bea Boehm, Betty Borst, Dev Bowly, Carol Bradford, Betty Davey, Helene East, Margaret Fallers, Bev erly Johnson, Emma Kemp, Bertha Kokuma, Rory Shanley Brown, Ann Stevens, Eleanor Swift, Clyde Watkins, Vicki Woodward.

On the opposite page you'll see some photos taken at Headquarters on the Fourth of July. What's been added is a bracket for the display of an American flag on the front of the building. From now on, the flag will fly whenever Headquarters is open. (Saturdays, 10 AM to noon; Sundays, 2 PM to 4 PM.)

We also remind you that the current exhibition is de lightful and should be shared with any weekend summer vis itors who come your way.

On behalf of her uncle Gilbert Longstreet, Mrs. Roberta Allen has offered us a box of early records of the Hyde Park Art Center, of which he was the Di rector in the 1930's. This is valuable archival material, the kind we keep in our storage area at Regenstein Library, and we welcome other similar contributions.

We are also seeking books on local history for a browser's bookshelf at Headquarters. These will not circulate. The core collection was augmented in June when the Co-op Book Sale co-chairmen withdrew from sale half a dozen volumes of historical interest and gave them to us. Thanks, Arthur Thur ner and John Stafford.

If you have something to offer, either for our Archives or our Headquarters Library, get in touch with Jean Block at 1700 E. 56th St., Chicago 60637.

Barbara Baer Capitman, director of the Miami Design Pre servation League, will be speaking in Chicago, and showing slides, on Thursday, August 27. It was Mrs. Capitman who led the effort to get a mile-square "Art Deco District" in Miami Beach listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The district is the youngest (1920's and 1930's) to be so desig nated.

The Capitman slide talk is scheduled for 6 PM on the 27th, at the Cliff Dwellers Club. Contribution: $3 per person. (Cash bar from 5:30 onward). There will be time after the talk for discussion of the Miami Beach plan and of the possibility of forming a Chicago Art Deco Club. For reservations, call Bunny Selig (We 5-5402) or HPHS member Ruth Knack (324-7119).

2-August, 1981

Above, tour group gathers at Headquarters; left, tour leader Margaret Bevacqua and HPHS president Devereux Bowly. Edward Campbell photo.

OUR JULY 4 EXCURSION WAS SOMETHING OF A FIZZLE

All in all, the excursion resembled a damp firecracker.

On July 4, when Edward Campbell pho tographed these cheerful HPHS members (above), they were bound for the Chica go Historical Society's Independence Day celebration.

Discomfort and Disappointment They were not especially concerned

about the threat of rain because in that

case they expected the program to take place indoors. And it did rain. Heavily.

A horrible discovery ensued: the bus's battery was dead.

After a "jump" from another motorist got the bus rolling, everyone relaxed-pre maturely. The bus died again on the Outer Drive near the Field Museum. The driver, lacking radio communication with his dispatcher, had to telephone for help. Meanwhile, some of his passengers got out of the bus and stood beside it.

PromPage3

Seeing this forlorn band, a motor ized Good Samaritan stopped and offered help. He ended by transporting home the older, wetter, and more upset members of the group. After the bus driver's brother appeared, bearing a replacement battery, he drove the remaining people home.

MORAL: Though technology some times fails us, human kindness survives. Not a bad lesson for these times!

Some of our group got wet. But the pro gram was not shifted indoors until its midpoint.

Hurwitz Recalls How the Co-op Grew

Then there wasn't room in the audi torium for everyone, and several from the Hyde Park contingent were excluded. So they looked at museum exhibits until noon, when they rejoined our chartered school bus for, the trip home.

From the Tribune, May 6, 1888:

Several residents of South Park who have recently purchased tandem tricycles have formed the Crescent Cycling Club. The Club will ride Tuesday and Friday evenings.

gave them their first donation, a check for $25. That afternoon, three more members were recruited: Paul Douglas, Dr. [Edward] Hinton of the Law School, and Mrs. [Nelson] Fuqua.

"After we got a bigger membership, we rented an old wooden building at Har per and Cable Court, for $35 a month, and opened a grocery store. Then we bought a used truck and started home de liveries.

Steady, Then Explosive, Growth "The membership increased further

and we rented a second store and broke through the wall in order to add a meat

department. When that store became too small, we rented a place on 57th St. be tween Harper and Blackstone. Later [about 1952] , we moved around the cor ner to a fine new store, where we stayed until the shopping center at 55th and Lake Park was built."

[Ed. Note: The "fine new store" was

an ice plant elegantly remodeled by Keck and Keck for supermarket use. The Co op's spectacular economic growth dates from its move to that store.]

No wonder Leon Hurwitz concludes his reminiscences by saying, "I have a lot of satisfaction when I go into the Co-op these days and see business that is going on."

August, 1981-3

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A Bit of Local Jewish History Endures at Oak Woods

By Charles B. Bernstein

Ed. Note: Mr. Bernstein is vice-president of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society and a Board member of the Jewish Genealogical Society. He helped Dan Rottenberg with Find ing Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy.

A forgotten corner of Oak Woods Cemetery is the final resting place of many early leaders of the Chicago Jewish community.

The old Jewish section along Oak Woods' southern border actually contains the cemeteries of three congregations. The eldest, Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Ub'nai Jacob (The Great Synagogue and Sons of Jacob), was the first congregation of Jews from Eastern Europe organized in Chicago. Founded in the early 1860's and chartered in 1867, it was based around 12th and Clark Streets.

Growth and Change

About 1900, it split into two parts, a West Side and a South Side branch, many of its members having moved south ward from 12th along Wabash and Indiana. The South Side branch, known as Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Anshe Dorom (Men of the South), built synagogues successively at 3434 Wabash, 5129 Indiana and finally at 5345 Greenwood. The latter closed its doors about 1950.

Among those buried at Oak Woods is the pillar of the ori ginal congregation and later of Anshe Dorom, David Zeman-

sky. He sent the congregation its first Torah scroll from New York in 1865.

Abraham Lieberman's Role

Another important early member, who started the south ward movement but did not live to see Anshe Dorom estab lished, was Abraham Lieberman (c. 1847-1894). Starting in Chicago as a junk peddler, he developed a scrap iron business which at his death employed 200 persons. His sons were lead ers of both Anshe Dorom and Cong. Rodfei Zedek (founded 1874). Lieberman was known for his charity and his descen dants continued this tradition.

Ironically, the endowment by his daughter-in-law, Mrs.

Jacob Lieberman, of a residence for the aged which was recently constructed in Skokie, is one of the causes for the forthcoming closing of the Drexel Home for the Aged, 6140

S. Drexel, long a cornerstone of the Hyde Park Jewish Com munity.

August, 1981-4

HYDE PARK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Volume 3, Number 4 November, 1981

OPENING OF THE HPHS HEADQUARTERS BUILDING on October, 26, 1980 following a costumed parade. On its first anniversary, the building won a top Chicago architectural award.

Architect Wins Award for Headquarters Renovation

By Ruth Eckdish Knack and Devereux Bowly, Jr.

Architect John Vinci won an Ameri can Institute of Architects Distinguished Building Award for his renovation of our headquarters. A jury of four promi nent architects from around the country considered 125 nominations of new buildings, renovations and remodelings by Chicago architects, and selected six win ners. They said of our project, which in cluded restoration of the exterior of the building, installation of all new mechani cal systems, and a completely rebuilt in terior based upon Vinci's historical re search and on-site investigation:

"A tiny simple building from the

past which has been lovingly retored to productive use in the present This one-room renovation of a then typical, now unique, nineteenth century suburban station has been accom plished with admirable restraint. Mr. Vinci's attention and understanding of detail have at once captured and evoked the vernacular of the time."

Vind, whose work for the Society was funded in part by a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, won two of the AIA Chicago Chapter awards last year for his renovation work at the Carson Pirie Scott & Co. depart ment store, and reconstruction of the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room at the Art Institute. Vinci is also assigned

to the renovation of the Robie House. Vinci was honored in an awards cere

mony on November 3, held at the Art In stitute. HPHS President Devereux Bowly, Jr., also accepted an award certificate on behalf of the Hyde Park Historical Socie ty in its dual role as building owner and general contractor.

Bowly said, "We are pleased and proud that John has won this prestigious award for his work on our building. He is not only an outstanding architect, but a joy to work with and know. He created for us, in the words of Muriel Beadle, 'a lit- tle jewel,' out of an abandoned and gut ted shell, and we will always be most grateful to him."

(Continued on Page 3)

100 Years of Reporting

Hyde Park Herald Plans New Exhibit

MURIEL BEADLE, FOUNDER AND EDITOR of this

newsletter, has turned over the reins to Margaret Bevacqua with the current issue. She will continue as editorial adviser and reporter.

• Bevacqua commented, "The Society owes a great debt to Muriel for bringing her journalistic experience and profession alism, as well as her dedication and devotion, to this publica tion. She will be a hard act to follow as editor. The paper will, however, continue in the same tradition to bring Society news and articles of Hyde Park history to our members. We will strive to uphold the standards Muriel Beadle set."

Other members on the newly established editorial are Ruth Knack, John McDermott, Ida DePencier, Carol Bradford, Devereux Bowly and Roberta McGowan.

Items for the newsletter should be mailed'to Margaret Bevacqua, 4800 S. Chicago Beach Drive, Apartment 2506S, Chicago, Ill. 60615. Deadline for the next edition is January 10, 1982.

THE SECOND ANNUAL COMMUNITY CAROL SING will

be scheduled in December. Rory Shanley-Brown, organizer of last year's successful caroling party, is coordinating this special event with neighborhood organizations. Watch for an an nouncement soon.

A NEWLY FORMED PROGRAM COMMITTEE, chaired

by Berenece Boehm, is working on ideas and plans for next year's Society programs. Committee members include: Linda Weisegger, Ann Stevens, Grace Richards, Stephanie Franklin, Adrian Alexander and Margaret Bevacqua. The goal is to bring a variety of programs to the Society to appeal to the many interests of its members.

CAROL BENADE has assumed responsibility for mailing this newsletter to our 425 members and is handling all meet ing announcements and special mailings. Randy Holgate, who did this previously, continues as membership chairman. Our thanks to both.

DUES ARE DUE. Avoid the Christmas mail rush and send your $10 check now for 1982 dues, drawn to the Hyde Park Historical Society, to Randy Holgate, 6044 S. Ingleside Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60637. Order memberships as Christmas gifts for friends.

The Hyde Park Herald is planning an exhibit for display in our headquarters building in conjunction with its 100th anniversary issue in January, 1982. The exhibit will feature stories, articles and photos from the Herald's colorful record of the community that village board president Adelbert Hobart described, in the January 5, 1884 Herald, as excelling "any village or town in the universe, and has yet only just begun to grow."

The Herald covered an area that was in the 1880s the larg est village in the world, stretching from 39th St. to 115th St., and listed its population, its real estate, its financial worth and even its street car timetables. But most of its social news ori ginated in the present Hyde Park, Kenwood, Woodlawn area.

Presses Roll in 1882

The paper had a history as varied and dramatic in many ways as the community. It began life as the South Side Herald, published by Clarence P. Dresser. Little is known about Dresser except that he was the Washington correspon dent as well as the publisher of the Hyde Park Herald, which he began in January, 1882 with Fred F. Bennett. Both Dresser and Bennett were classmates in Hyde Park, along with John

D. Sherman, who joined them and also wrote articles and editorials.

Personal journalism was rampant in the early days of Chi cago history and no holds were barred in reporting or expres sing an editorial opinion. The Hyde Park Herald was no ex ception. One of the most vivid examples is in the January 26, 1884 issue where it is reported "A brute named Cavill, who has already richly deserved to be drummed out of town, was fined $15 and costs for beating his wife, a nice, quiet, little woman whom the Union Charitable Society have (sic) established in a small store, near the Fifty-fourth Street school-house. He is a good workman, but lazy, and has not even the excuse of drunkenness for his brutality to his wife."

Opposed Annexation

The Herald inveighed against the annexation of Hyde Park into Chicago in 1889, warning the readers that only the saloon keepers would be the chief beneficiary of such

a vote because Hyde Park was "dry" and Chicago was "wet." Through the vicissitudes of wars, prohibition, depression and urban renewal, the Herald has reported on the commu

nity's news, albeit with a sometime individual bias.

The exhibit will open on January 31. Centennial edi tions of the Hyde Park Herald will be available.

THE 1982 HPHS MEMBERSHIP DRIVE is well under way, co-chaired by Judith Rudolph and Alta Blakely. The goal is 150 new members,

By December 1 Carol Benade, Mailing Chairman, and her committee will have hand-addressed 800 invitations to pro spective members, almost all in zip codes 60615 and 60637.

Two new categories were added to the regular $10 member ship. Members can participate as Sponsors for $25 or bene factors for $50 or more. The Board feels there are those in Hyde Park interested in the history of the community and dedicated to its continued vitality who would be happy to make these additional contributions.

2-November, 1981

Architect Wins ...

(Continued from Page 1)

Annual Dinner Set For Feb. 6 Cornell Award Nominations Due

The Society accomplished the re building work for $45,000, exclusive of the cost to the building and furnish ings. After the work was completed, Vinci continued to act as a volunteer consultant to select the furnishings.

Besides Vinci and·the HPHS, the other

winners of this year's AIA awards are: Weese Seegers Hickey Weese Architects, Ltd., for remodeling the 1211 N. LaSalle Apartments; Stanley Tigerman & Asso ciates for an addition to the Anti-Cruel ty Society; Marvin Ullman for the Eisen berg house in Lincoln Park; Murphy/Jahn for the De La Garza Career Center in East Chicago; and Holabird & Root for the corporate headquarters of Hollister, Inc., in Libertyville.

Photographs of the winning entries will be on display at the Art Institute until December 7.

Several HPHS board members at tended the awards ceremony and the reception that followed in the Trading Room of the Art Institute.

Off the Press

Chicago Churches and Synagogues

By George Lane

Loyola University Press, 225 pages,

Chicago is a city of churches and syna gogues. By one estimate more than 2000 may be found scattered between the lakefront and the city's western limits. They range in size and style from mas sive stone monuments to humble store fronts. And they count among their num ber many exceptionally beautiful and architecturally significant buildings.

Chicago Churches and Synagogues singles out 125 of these extraordinary buildings-from old St. Patrick's, begun in 1852, to the ultra-modern St. Joseph's Ukrainian Church. The author provides a detailed description of each and out lines the history of the building and the congregations who have worshiped there. Hyde Park churches are included.

The fourth Annual Dinner and Meet ing is set for Saturday, February 6, 1982, at the International House, on the cam pus of the University of Chicago, 1414 E. 59th Street. The festivities will start at 6:30 p.m. with a cocktail reception, followed by dinner at 7:30 p.m.

Chapter member Adrian Alexander is chairman of the event, assisted by com mittee members Ann Stevens and Mar garet Bevacqua.

International House is preparing for an evening as successful as last year in its newly renovated banquet room. I House is marking its fiftieth anniversary in 1982 and is happy to welcome the Hyde Park

, Historical Society as its first dining group of its anniversary year.

Chairman Alexander and his commit tee are lining up local talent for a pro gram of entertainment with many sur prises for attendees.

Devereux Bowly, Jr., will report on the progress made by HPHS during the year 1981. •

Cornell Awards

Highlight of the evening will be the announcement of the Paul Cornell Award winners and presentation of certificates. Clyde Watkins is chairman of the awards program.

"Nominations are now open," Wat kins said. "We hope our members will

United Church of Hyde Park. Photo by George Lane.

give this some thought and make several nominations.

"Anyone is eligible for an award, ex cept a currently serving HPHS board

member. During 1981, he or she must have significantly furthered knowledge, appreciation or preservation of Hyde Park's historical heritage.

"Such knowledge, appreciation or pre

servation, may have been fostered by authorship of books or articles; the writ ing and giving of lectures; the creation of exhibits or student projects; the restora tion of exterior or interior public spaces of commercial, civic or residential build ings, or of buildings which have been sympathetically renovated and successful ly adapted to new uses," he stated.

Last year's awardees included: Hans and Kathy Morsbach and Stephen and Marieanne Thomas for exterior renova tion of their houses; Ancona School for community house tours; Chicago Archi tecture Foundation for Hyde Park-Ken wood tours; Hyde Park-Kenwood Com munity Conference for its garden tour; Wallace P. Rustenholtz for his book, The First Unitarian Society of Chicago-A Brief History, and the Chicago Public Library for restoration of the Blackstone branch.

Nominations Due Dec. 15

1982 Award nominations are due De cember 15, 1981. HPHS members should submit short written statements in sup port of their nominees. Send statements to Clyde Watkins, 4752 S. Kimbark, Chicago, IL. 60615.

Break-In

There was a break-in at the headquarters building on August 8 or 9. The intruder broke and entered through a window. He stole petty cash from the cash box, an engineer's cap, clock, the Society's col lection of T-shirts, a flag and the flag stand given us by the Hyde Park Travel Club. Fortunately, the intruder had no sense of history. The valuable collection of books of the Blue Sky Press in the dis play cases were untouched II

November, 1981-3

Off the Press

The Fair Women

By Jeanne Madeline Weimann Academy Chicago Press. 621 pages. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $14.95.

The book about the Women's Building of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893: designed, built and managed by women, it contained arts, crafts, inven tions and products by women the world over. The controversy and ferment sur rounding the establisment of the Wo man's Building, under the leadership of socialite Bertha Palmer, is one of the most fascinating untold chapters in

all of women's history.

"The author has gleaned and has or ganized admirably, a massive amount of information in this illustrated volume.. . those interested in women's history.. . will find this an intriguing documentary."

-Publishers Weekly

Portrait of Bertha Palmer by Anders Zorn. Courtesy of Art Institute of Chica go From The Fair Women.

4-November, 1981

VOL. 30 NO. 1

A Hyde Park Tribute to Paul Douglas

Senator Paul Douglas (second from left) and Representative Abner Mikva (second from right) in an undated photo from a campaign event

By Lee Botts

yde Park lakefront and Indiana dunes lovers threw a party to let Senator Paul Douglas know how

much they appreciated him when he experienced both triumph and defeat in early fall of 1966. The party

was attended by the activists who had fought Mayor Richard J. Daley's efforts to turn Lake Shore Drive into part of the interstate highway system in 1965 and

others who worked to prevent total industrialization of the Indiana Lake Michigan shoreline from Gary to

Michigan City. Unexpected guests included state and local politicians.

The crinmph was Congressional authorization of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore as the first national park within a major metropolitan area. The defeat

was the loss to Charles Percy of the U.S. Senate seat Douglas had held since 1948. The party was organized with Mary Lou and Tom Stauffer and the Save the . Dunes Council and held in the Botts's family home ►8

<O at 5216 Blackstone. At the time I was editor and Mary Lou was the advertising director of the Hyde Park Herald. The Botts family remembers the party as the time the old piano had to be sawed up.

Hyde Park ties to conservation of the Indiana dunes began in the 1890s, when botanist John Coulter left Harvard to join the faculty of the new University of Chicago because of his interest in the great diversity of_ vegetation in the dunes. The doctoral thesis published in 1899 by Coulter's student, Henry Chandler Cowles, set forth then new concepts about plant communities that are the reason the dunes are still known in science as the birthplace of ecology in North America.

This was also the period when Hyde Park residents began to enjoy the Indiana dunes for recreation and

U. of C. faculty members began to acquire second homes there. Cowles joined the Prairie Club that organized weekend walks in natural areas around Chicago, especially the Indiana dunes. The Prairie Club first proposed creation of a national park on the south shore of Lake Michigan after the U.S. Steel Corporation began massive removal of dunes in 1906 for construction of its Gary Works and the City of Gary. Congress finally authorized the park more than 50 years later and then only because of the persistence of Douglas and the Save the Dunes Council, whose m€mbership included many Hyde Parkers. -

Douglas, who bad taught economics at the

university, and his wife Emily kept their house in Dune Acres near Chesterton after they went to Washington.

He began championing a national park in the dunes in the early 1950s in response to an appeal from Dorothy Buell, the organizer of the Save the Dunes Council. After World War II, she had realized that the remaining dunes were threatened by plans of the several large steel producers who had been acquiring large areas of Indiana shoreline expansion between Gary and Michigan City. Indiana politicians had refused to support preservation of the dunes because of the longstanding efforts of the State of Indiana to promote creation of a harbor and industrialization of

the whole shoreline at the south end of Lake Michigan.

A final agreement known as the "port/park compromise" was finally negotiated by Stewart Udall, Secretary of Interior in the Kennedy administration, but had not yet been passed by Congress when it became clear that Douglas would lose to Percy in November, 1966. Meanwhile, Douglas had been involved in another fierce battle for parkland on the Lake Michigan shoreline with Daley's proposal to widen Lake Shore Drive and destroy Jackson Park by re-routing it behind the Museum of Science and Industry to connect with Stony Island Avenue at 67th Street. This time Marion Despres, wife of Hyde Park's independent alderman,

Leon Despres, was the woman who organized the opposition as the Daniel Burnham Committee.

Pictures of Hyde Parkers standing in front of bulldozers and chaining themselves to trees that would be cut down, next to signs changed to read "Your Highway Axes at Work," made national front page news, to the great embarrassment of the mayor who was considered invincible.

When Douglas failed to take a public stand on the issue, Hyde Park activists picketed his home as well as the mayor's. In actuality, Douglas worked behind the scenes to persuade the mayor to stop construction and hire the planning firm of Johnson, Johnson and Roy to develop an alternative plan that would save Jackson Park. It was this battle that led to passage of

the Lakefront Protection Ordinance in 1973 that made public ownership of the Chicago lakefront official city policy.

Douglas, who said later in his autobiography that

he realized he was self-righteous, had been hurt by the lack of appreciation for his efforts to save Jackson Park.

The party was intended to demonstrate appreciation by both Indiana and Hyde Park activists, including those who had mistakenly been critical the year before. An open invitation was issued for anyone to come who cared about the Indiana dunes, Jackson Park or the Chicago lakefront.

It became obvious the day of the party that the attendance would be large. Participation by more than local politicians was announced by a Chicago

policeman who appeared at the door to say that he was there to manage traffic and others who had been sent by the Cook County sheriff

At the Botts's Queen Anne Victorian house in the afternoon, it was decided that the beat up old upright piano in the first parlor should be removed to the kids' playroom in the basement to make more room. When it became hopelessly stuck in the stairway, I rushed off to Anderson's Hardware Store to plead that someone be sent to saw up a piano. Fortunately, they knew me well as a customer with a house built in 1885 that always needed something.

Douglas must have known, as did everyone in the very full house that evening, that he would lose the upcoming election but he clearly enjoyed the demon stration of support and appreciation. In late October, Congress finally authorized of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, the only national park ever created over the opposition of the state in which it was located, thanks to leadership from another state. Jackson Park also survived. Pieces of the piano in the furnace room reminded the Bottses of the party until we left the house in 1978. We still enjoy the Indiana dunes and the

Chicago lakefrom and appreciate Paul Douglas. CilI:l

W1111,.,. 10011

Sixty Years of Hyde Park

Hyde Park is not the same as sixty years ago. This was the conclusion of an audience of more than fifty people attending a presentation of the film, You

Are Here, developed by students of the University of Chicago to introduce freshmen to the unique community they live in.

The program was presided over by Dr. Wallace

E. Goode, Jr., Associate Dean of Students in the College of the University of Chicago and Director of the University's Community Service Center, and took place on Sunday, October 14, at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club.

You Are Here, which begins in the Checkerboard Lounge, is a fascinating account of the ever-evolving cultural and social factors that make Hyde Park special. The film featured scenes of long-gone buildings, views of new houses and other structures, and comments of south siders with divergent opinions abour urban renewal. In the discussion that followed, some people recalled about the "safe community" that existed before urban renewal. Others pointed out that in the early 1950s, Hyde Park's crime rate was the second highest in the city. The University of Chicago was seriously considering moving to the suburbs.

Most people concluded that had it done so, Hyde Park would be vastly different today.

Hyde Parkers left looking forward to a sequel now being readied by the Community Service Center. FSV

Progress on Nancy Hays's Collection

Archivist Michal Safar is working with members of Nancy Hays's family and interested community residents to sort through documents, reports,

newsletters, and other memorabilia relating to Nancy's long history of action in environmental and cultural issues. 141 boxes of photographs and photographic negatives have already been deposited in the Special Collections Research Center of Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago.

\V I II I c r 2 0 0 8

China and Japan at the World's Columbian Exposition

On Sunday, November 18, a small but enthusiastic audience enjoyed a stirring presentation by Andrea Stamm, exhibit curator of Northwestern University and the Chinatown Museum Foundation.

Punctuating her talk with archival images, maps, and representations of Asian art, Ms. Stamm described China's and Japan's unique contributions to the success of this great Pair. She also detailed efforts to enlist the' participation of the two countries and some

of the rivalries that developed between them.

Japan was an enthusiastic participant. Its representatives were educated at western universities, wore western dress, and spoke perfect English. Japan was eager to show that it was making rapid progress in science, technology, and education while at the same time maintaining its distinctive culture. It wanted to improve trade, and hoped that the

U.S. government would reform what was perceived as an unequal treaty imposed in 1854 when Japan was first opened to the West.

By contrast, the Chinese contribution was financed by private agencies. President Benjamin Harrison's approach to the Chinese government in 1890 to join in Fair activities was rejected outright; China deeply resented the so-called "Exclusion Law," which severely limited immigration into the U.S. Chinese had long been

subject to severe negative stereotyping. They were ridiculed for the male custom of wearing a long queue (braid), and for their reluctance to assimilate into western society. Despite this sense of hostility, the Chinese community in Chicago managed to finance a theater, a small religious temple (joss house), and bazaar, all of which were near Ellis Avenue at the less desirable western end of the Midway. The theater was popular, but there was a measure of concern that Chinese actors brought in to perform at the theater would refuse to go home.

The Japanese government appropriated $630,000 for the country's participation, more than twice

as much as Great Britain ($291,000) or Spain ($214,000). Japan impressed the Fair's organizers by its heavy investment and by donating the famous Ho o-den at the north end of Wooded Island, designed

to be the only permanent structure of the Fair, to the City of Chicago as a gift. The Chinese community of Chicago spent $90,000 for their three structures.

Carpenters brought in from Japan constructed the Ho-a-den, a tea house north of the Ho-a-den at the eastern edge of the waterway connecting the north pond and east lagoon, and a bazaar at the eastern end

Japanese Tea Garden with Fisheries Building in Background

Japanese Carpenters at work

of the Midway. The carpenters enchanted the public with their efficient work habits, their use of wooden pegs rather than nails, and their uniquely patterned uniforms.

In an art competition, thousands of objects were put forward in each art category by participating countries. In this competition,Japan fared better than any other country, winning 48 of a total of 118 awards.

......

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The Chinese and Japanese enterprises were important contributions co the success of the great Columbian Exposition. Visitors came away with a new understanding of the sophistication and richness of these Asian cultures. FSV

Exhibit panels from the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago and the Japanese Consulate will be on display at the Society's Headquarters for several more weeks.

• HELP WANTED•

Society seeks ProgramChairman

The Hyde Park Historical Society is seeking a new Program Chairman. The Program Chairman is responsible for creative leadership in developing and organizing

the annual dinner, and arranging speakers, tours, and other activities reflecting the goals of the Society.

The current acting Program Chairman,

Rita Allen, is no longer able to serve in this position. The Society is grateful for her services over the past two years.

Carol Bradford and Andrea Stamm

Chinese Theater

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More information is available through the Society's website, www.hydeparkhistory.org

Society seeks Memllership Secretary

The Hyde Park Historical Society is seeking a new Membership Secretary. A membership secretary is responsible for keeping the membership list up to date, maintaining a data base of members names that can be used for printing mailing labels,

and contributing to the recruitment of new members.

The current secretary, Chelsey Parrott Sheffer, is no longer able to serve in this position. The Society is grateful for her services over the past two years.

More information is available through the Society's website, www.hydeparkhistory.org

\V I n f r r :l O O 8

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF CHICAGO:

A Short History

This is the second installment of a talk, given by Claude Weil to the Hyde Park Historical Society, on March 6, 2002. Claude was a resident of International House in 1955-56, and Associate Director of Business Affairs from 1983 until 1996. International House celebrates its 15th year in 2007. This report will continue in future issues of the Newsletter.

By 1935, Bruce Dickson had been replaced as Director by Ernest Price who had a degree from Johns Hopkins University and had been in the Foreign Service. Price actively promoted programs with an international focus, among them one called "The Quest for World Peace" and an address by Bertrand Russell entitled "Munich and After." An invitation was even extended to FDR. Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmefia, future presidents of the Philippines attended a conference celebrating the creation of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. A series of Pan American lectures was held. In 1938, a program called "International House of the Air" was featured on local radio station WGN. An Episcopal Conference on Negro Problems was held in the House in 1939. Just before Pearl Harbor, Jan Masaryk, Czech diplomat and opponent of fascism, was a guest at the House.

One time, Price asked the Board of Governors to explore the possibility of developing a country campus for I-House residents, an idea soon recognized as impractical.

In 1938, life at I-House was disrupted by a revolt against Price and Mr. Whipple, the business manager, organized by some members of the Student Council. Residents complained about House operations and undemocratic practices, accusing Price of encouraging employees co spy on them and report their activities. Accusations even included wire-tapping. Lack of consultation between the residents, the director, and the Board of Governors was a matter of concern. Food management was criticized, including the charging

of one cent for an extra pat of butter. It must be

remembered that student resident workers were paid no more than 40 cents an hour. On the whole,

allegations against Price were rather vague. Peace was finally restored with the assistance of the Board of Governors and University administration.

As the thirties progressed and dictatorships became more prevalent around the world, frictions

developed among residents with different points of view. A Spanish resident with Republican sympathies threatened to move out if the House admitted a Spaniard who supported Franco. Controversy arose from allowing a Hitler supporter to openly expound fascist views. Chinese and Japanese residents were uncomfortable co-residents. As the world headed toward war, the House became concerned about the diminishing number of foreign residents. In 1938, the House had 520 residents of whom only 100 were from abroad.

Price felt that a person's politics should not disqualify him or her from becoming a resident. As early as 1935, it was found necessary to develop a policy with respect to socio-political problems including a mandate chat no political candidates should be allowed to use International House. The person who helped formulate this policy was Adlai Stevenson, who had joined the Board of Governors in 1933. He served as its President prior to the

beginning of World War II, a position he held until 1958. During the lace thirties and into the early forties, David Rockefeller served on the Board of Governors, resigning when he entered the military at the beginning of the war. In mid-1935, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gifted to the House the land behind the House chat now constitutes the tennis courts.

Notably missing from the minutes of the quarterly meeting the Board of Governors held on December 9, 1941 was mention of the attack on Pearl Harbor or the war. It is of interest to note that in 1939,

President Hutchins took an anti-war stance, a position with which Mr. Price disagreed.

It took a while for the war to affect I-House residents. Early in 1942, the board of Governors was considering changing the House from a residence for foreign students to a dormitory but decided against it. In April, 1942, Price was granted a leave-of-absence in order to work for the U.S. State Department. The position was filled temporarily by Francis Mayer Oakes, the Assistant Director, who then was replaced by Charles Rovetta of the Business School, who became part-time Acting Director. Rovetta was an assistant professor in the Business School and may previously have been a house head at the Burton-

] udson Courts, a residence hall for men.

Shortly thereafter, 500 U.S. Coast Guard men and recruits occupied the men's side of the House, later to be replaced by army meteorology students. In January, 1943, 640 male cadets and 190 women students occupied the House. By April, 1943, the women

had moved out and the House was occupied fully by the military. The barbershop, the gift shop, and the valet shop continued operations during the war. By

\V l n f ,. '.l O O 8

June, 1944, the military had completely vacated the building and it was returned to civilian use. During the period of military occupation, the House had probably its sole authorized four-legged resident, a dog named Isobar. The animal's photo can be found in an I-House scrapbook, which shows a splint on one of its legs resulting from an encounter with a car. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the meteorology students held a reunion at the House.

Demand for I-House space was high in the immediate post-war years. Conveniently, some if not all of the men's room continued to be furnished with bunk beds presumably installed by the military.

In July, 1947, Charles Rovetta resigned at director and was replaced by Harry Fultz. Changes taking place following his appointment were the advent

of the first employee's union, adoption of a general retirement plan, and assumption by the University of the administration of House's payroll and general

disbursements. The House turned over its investments to the University to be included in its investment pool.

Many kinds of programs were offered to the residents, including English classes for foreign students taught by one Hugh Walpole, considered by some to be an en/ant terrible on campus. Language

d1. cu sion groups included -t:hose in German, Fr nch, Spanish, Greek, Scandinavian, and Russian. The Distinguished Speakers Series included presentations by University faculty including Quincy Wright, Hans Morgenthau, and others. Illinois Senator Paul Douglas spoke, as did the ambassador from Burma, Ralph Bunche, and Icalian film director Vittorio De Sica.

David Rockefeller, a University graduate, gave a talk entitled World Brotherhood, an Economic Necessity. Lunches for consuls general in the Chicago area were organized. There were gospel discussion groups, Bible classes, record concerts, and Sunday evening dinners. Also taking place were concerts, dances, Viennese Waltz nights, folk dancing, the Friday Frolics, monthly formals, and Saturday informals.

In 1946, Mrs. Ruth Bush contributed the antique maps now on display in the main corridor of the first floor. Mr. and Mrs. Noah van Cleef established the fund that still furnishes newspapers, periodicals, and books for the library. The grandfather clock on display in the main corridor was donated in 1959.

Incidentally, in its early days I-House residents called this corridor the Peacock Alley because, in the days when sexes were still rigidly segregated, young men and women could strut their stuff for each other's benefit.

In 1952, a Festival of Nations was organized as part of United Nations Week. Usually held in the

spring, the Festival soon rook on a life of its own. Another long-lasting program was inaugurated in 1956 when the community of Paris, Illinois, began hosting foreign students and their families for the Thanksgiving holidays. This program was the idea of Trudy Trogdon, who remained involved with it for many years. Several Illinois communities now participate in the program.

Over the years, students from other Chicago colleges and universities, visitors from foreign countries,

and trainees from various factories and businesses enriched the basic population of University of Chicago students. As the 1950s progressed, I-House began having problems maintaining full occupancy throughout the academic year. Nearly full during the Fall Quarter, the building began emptying out in Winter and Spring Quarters. Summer Quarter saw even more empty rooms. Competition came from other dormitories on campus as well as apartments and rooms available in the neighborhood. During the summer, conferences, continuing education courses, and training programs provided tenants for some of the rooms.

In the mid-fifties a letter written to the President of the Board of Governors complained vigorously about a decline in housekeeping standards and the run- down appearance-of the House. In the view of many, however, these issues paled compared to problems of safety in nearby streets.

In July, 1955, Jack Kerridge joined the staff as Director of Activities and as University Foreign Student Advisor, a function that remained in the House until 1975. Kerridge was appointed Director ofthe House in 1962. During this period, I-House joined the International House Association, an organization formed with the support of the New York, Berkeley, and Chicago houses. The mission of the I.H.A. was to create ties among International House residents during their time in residence and after they had returned to their homes. The I.H.A. led a fitful existence until 1959 when the national headquarters was closed. The Chicago chapter, one of the few chapters remaining in operation, was involved primarily in organizing social programs and trips.

A group of supporters, the Friends of International

House, existed prior to the war and was revived now and then, but does not seem to have played a major role in I-House affairs. The three Houses published the

International House Quarterly during this period. CTim

Future articles will describe Claude Weil's residency as a student in International House and his role in preserving the International House from the wrecking ball.

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Society's Dinner a Success

he annual dinner of the Hyde Park Historical Society, held at the Quadrangle Club on February 23, was an unqualified success. 150 members

and invited guests had much to celebrate, including former Fifth Ward Alderman Leon Despres' 100th birthday, the 75th anniversary of the Museum of Science and Industry, and outstanding contributions in architectural preservation, education, and local history.

Winners of Paul Cornell Awards were Leon Despres, the Mu um of Science and Industry, and Dr. Larry Hawkins of the Office of Special Programs of the University of Chicago. Marian and Leon Despres Preservation Awards were presented to Dan Aucunas, for restoration of the Vierling House on South Greenwood Avenue, and the University of Chicago Medical Center for preserving the American School of Correspondence building. Peter Ascoli received the Jean Block award for his biography of his grandfather, Julius Rosenwald.

After-dinner speaker and State Representative Barbara Flynn Currie entertained the audience with a personal account of why and how she became a political figure in Hyde Park.

4th Ward Alderman Toni Preckwinkle {I) and State. Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie

As he received his Cornell Award for extraordinary service, Leon Despres reminisced about his nearly ►8

-<O 100 years in Hyde Park. After naming several Hyde Parkers who have elected to state and national office over the years, he inspired cheers by saying chat, "next year I might see a Hyde Parker in the White House." The enthusiastic audience knew he was referring co Senator Barack Obama!

Jack Spicer with Dan Aucunus (r) Jane and Roger Hildebrand withDr. Larry Hawkins (r)

Alice Schlessinger,

1928-2008

Alice Schlessinger, who passed away January 7, 2008, served her family and community for as long as she lived in Hyde Park. In the lace 1990s and early 2000s, she was a vigorous and committed president of the Hyde Park Historical Society. The following statements are excerpted from the eulogy delivered at her funeral by her youngest son, Gideon Schlessinger.

Alice Schlessinger, born in Cincinnati inJanuary of 1928, was perpetually optimistic and cheerful and she was loved by good friends and casual acquaintances alike for her beauty, her grace, and her lively sense of humor.

She always excelled academically, ztltimatefy finishing first in her class in Economics at the University of Cincinnati and securing her Phi Beta Kappa key.

Debate, formal or informal, provided an outlet for the full range of her intellectual gifts (T)here was endless

depth to her intellect and she always maintained the

co11rage of her convictions.

Our mother was 01tr inspiration. She was and will always be the voice in our heads telling us to be better. She was a standard bearer in the things she said and the way she lived her life. We will remember her in nearly all that we strive to do.

To date, the Historical Society has received more than $800 in donations in Alice's honor. Her husband, Nathan, sent the following comments, addressed to Carol Bradford, retiring President of the Society:

Dear Carol,

Thank you for your note of appreciation for our family's assignation of the Historical Society as the viewpoint of contrib1ttions in Alice's memory. Alice devoted a lot of time and energy to the affait-s of the Society and made many good friends in the process. Her special interest was to improve the life of the Community in every aspect she to1tched and that interest guided our choice of recipients.

Sincerely, Nathan Schlessinger

Hyde Park Center Program Attracts Large Group

More than 50 enthusiasts of local architectural history crowded into the Society's Headquarters on Saturday, March 1, for Jack Spicer's program about the Hyde Park Center, the oldest part of the neighborhood.

This Center extends from 53rd to 55th Streets north to south, and lies between Harper and Woodlawn Avenues. The program was enhanced by photographs taken by Society member David Schalliol.

The houses are noted for their brickwork, stone carving, and detailed carpentry. Arrangements of windows, roof gables, and porches contribute to the uniqueness of each building. The community lost many of these lovely buildings during t'.1rban renewal, which makes preserving those that remain important indeed. Jack Spicer called particular attention to the region's oldest house, the Henry Clay Work house behind 5317 South Dorchester Ave.

The program concluded with a walking tour of this special area.

Great Lakes Folksinger to Sing Songs of

Henry Clay Work

On Sunday, April 13, Great Lakes balladeer Lee Murdock will sing in a program entitled Folk ongs of the Great Lakes Region at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, 5480 South Kenwood Avenue, immediately following the Club's annual Pancake Breakfast. Murdock will include songs of Lake Michigan and Hyde Park legend Henry Clay Work. Around 1860, Henry Clay Work

built the small cottage behind the house at 5317 South Dorchester Avenue. One of the village's earliest citizens, Work served as secretary of the Hyde Park Village Council while composing Civil War songs, including Marching through Georgia and Wake Nicodemits. He also composed the well-known ballad, Grandfather's Clock. Work's Great Lakes songs include The Wreck of the Lady Elgin.

This free event will begin immediately after the Breakfast at 1:00 PM, and last approximately

until 3:00 PM. All Hyde Parkers, young, old, and everything in between, are cordially invited to come to this special event.

Recordings by Lee Murdock will be available for purchase.

This performance is supported by the Illinois Humanities Council.

Lee Murdock

S I) r n Ll' 0 0 8

Chicago's Finest Transportation:

The Illinois Central Electric

Fourth part of a series about the history of the Illinois Central Railroad's Electric Commuter Service

By John G. Allen and Roy G. Benedict

ELECTRIC CARS FORA GREAT COMMUTER RAILROAD

Like most railroads electrifying their commuter services, the Illinois Central opted for multiple-unit cars, a concept first proved on Chicago's South Side elevated line in 1897.1 Multiple-unit cars ,carry their own electric motors for propulsion, and also have their own sets of controls-both of which functions had been hitherto limited to locomotives. The IC started electric service with 260 multiple-unit cars, in motor trailer pairs, but only 215 of these cars were brand

new in 1926. Forty-five of the 130 trailer cars used when electric service began were in fact built between 1921 and 1924 by the Pullman Company, and were hauled by steam locomotives before being placed in electric service in 1926. These cars were designed with the_ in.teotio.u._that tb.e.y w uld.be_CQDYetted..m cu:· operation. The 215 new cars consisted of 130 motor cars built by the Pullman Company, and the other 85 were trailers, built by the Srandard Steel Car Company. The railroad took delivery of another 20 cars in 1928- ten motors and ten trailers, all built by Pullman, thus bringing the total electric fleet to 280.2 Although

the cars were showing their age by the 1960s, when delivered they were at the head of their class:

Each car seated 84 passengers, mostly on reversible rattan-backed cross seats. To promote easy entry and exit, there were two wide doors at either end of the car leading to large vestibules. In the area of the car interior adjacent to the vestibttles, longitttdinal seats provided easy circulation and room for standing passengers.

Acceleration was brisk: 0 to 15 mph in 10 seconds, 15 to 28 mph in another 10 seconds. Theoretical top speed was 57 mph; actttal was 68-70.3

The cars always operated in motor-trailer pairs, and were unable to operate any other way-partly because they shared air brake equipment, and partly because each car had an engineer's cab at only one end.4 For the most part, the same motor and trailer pair formed a "married" pair for decades. The trailer was always to the north of its motor car. Having no pantographs on its roof (the motor cars had two, one at each end), only a trailer would fit beneath the low overhead footbridge

to the South Water Street entrance at Randolph St. Station at the north end of the tracks downtown. (This foot passage was removed by the early 1970s in

preparation for construction of the Illinois Center office buildings above the station platforms, in time for the delivery of today's double-deck Highliners.)

The IC's cars were much larger than those used on Chicago's elevated lines, but they were quite similar in their interior fittings. Most of the cars' interiors were taken up by crosswise seats, with "walkover" backs that the trainmen moved from one direction to another at the end of the line so that passengers could face forward. At the ends of the cars, adjacent to the vestibules, were longitudinal bench seats, above which were suspended grab handles for the benefit of standees. If there was still a need for more standing space, passengers could walk along the aisles and hold onto one of the grab handles built into the seat backs.5 Above everything were incandescent lights, partly but not entirely encased in flower-shaped glass housings. As on the elevated, there were slots above the windows and on the bulkhead walls at both ends of the cars' interiors for advertisements (a feature now confined to the doorways of cars on Metra).

The cars went through three interior paint schemes in their long lives. Initially, the interior scheme consisted of imitation wood grain, which provided an element of continuity with the earlier wood-bodied cars which th 122.Q.s_fleet was reJ;>lacin . During the mid-19"0s, the wood grain was replaced with dark

A six-car train of the original dark green cars is approaching Roosevelt Road from the yard in preparation for the afternoon rush hour in 1977. Following anaccident in 1972, the railroad added high-visibility orange to the ends of its commuter cars, old and new.

orange paint. By the early 1960s, the car interiors were all painted maroon below the windows, and from the windows on up they were painted in a pinkish tone that the railroad referred ro as "peach glow".

The !Cs specifications for the cars included an interesting combination of railroading and rapid transit practice. On the one hand, the cars included steel and canvas frames (known in the railroad

industry as diaphragms) protecting passengers from the elements as they crossed from one car to another. Neither in Chicago nor in other cities did rapid transit cars include this feature, which was limited to railroads. On the other hand, the cars featured rapid transit-style couplers which automatically made and released the contacts for the air brakes and the electric wiring when cars were being coupled and uncoupled.

No other railroad combined the use of diaphragms and automatic couplers. Automatic couplers allow train crews to add and remove cars from trains much more quickly and easily than would be possible if the cars used the air brake and electrical hoses that are part of conventional railroad practice.

Another rapid transit touch (which fell out of use with the Highliners in the 1980s) was the use of roll signs to show the destination and type of train. Mounted in special housings opposite the' engineer's window at the end of each pair of cars and in the second window from the left along the outside of each car were roll signs showing destinations, each

controlled individually by a hand crank, allowing train crews to set the signs for each particular train before the start of a run. (The Highliners were built with

roll signs, the settings of which could be remotely controlled, thus saving train crews from having to set each sign individually.)

Although the signs did not anticipate changes in operation made in 1973, they allowed trainmen to show every possible type of service operated in 1926, including short-turn trains reversing at 53rd St.-Hyde Park, 67th St., 72nd St., or Burnside (site of the railroad's shops at 95th St., now the site of Chicago State University).

OPENING AND INITIALYEARS

By the 1960s, commuters would notice (and complain about) the lack of air-conditioning, but in 1926 a ride free from the great clouds of coal smoke that steam locomotives produced was a great plus for commuters. The IC and its riders made the most of what was at the time an enormous improvement in service.

The IC inaugurated electric operation with a splash. Electric service actually began on July 21, 1926 (seventy years to the day after the IC inaugurated commuter service), and there was a brief transition period during which electric and steam ran together.6 By early August, the IC's commuters were enjoying all-electric service, which the railroad and the city officially celebrated on August 7, 1926 with a parade, the theme of which was progress in transportation. As part of this occasion, the railroad ran four electric commuter trains side by side to downtown Chicago, all draped in bunting.7

For the first five years, IC Electric trains used temporary upper platforms at Randolph St. Station in the same basic location, but not in the same lateral position, as the concrete platforms now used by South

Shore Line trains. It was not until late 1931 that the lower level platforms, beneath the waiting room, were completed at Randolph St.8

During the 1920s, fully half of the IC Electric's passengers were traveling locally between downtown and stations no further south than 67th St. In 1929, the IC's electric commuter trains carried nearly

36 million passenger trips. For many years, Rand McNally's Chicago Street Guide and Transportation Directory included maps of the Chicago Surface Lines streetcar lines, Chicago Rapid Transit's elevated system, Chicago Motor Coach's bus routes-and the urban portion of the Illinois Central Electric. Not surprisingly, no other commuter railroad received this honor.

The IC did not merely serve existing demand; it helped create new business. Prior to 1926, the passage of 400 steam-powered trains a day made East Hyde Park, downwind from the tracks, less than fully desirable as a place to live. The coming of electric service led to a boom in apartment construction east of the tracks, and many of roday's older apartment buildings date from the 1920s as a result.9

Yet even as the IC was helping to transform East Hyde Park into a stronghold of upper-middle-class apartment living, the rich and famous were already abandoning the South Side. Around the turn of

the 20th century, Potter Palmer, the McCormicks, and other affluent residents started deserting their Prairie Avenue mansions (which, like Hyde Park and Kenwood, were downwind from the Srockyards and other South Side industries) in favor of the Gold Coast and points beyond along the north lakefront. These demographic changes presaged much more decisive shifts in population, race, and economics which would affect the IC's ridership by the 1950s and 60s.

1 Bruce G. Moffat, The "L ": The Development of Chicago's Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932, Chicago: Central Electric Railfans' Association, 1995, pp. 36-37

2 Except for the 85 trailers delivered by Standard Steel Car in 1926, all of the IC's original green electric cars were built by Pullman. In 1929, Pullman acquired the Standard Steel Car Company, and for decades thereafter did business as Pullman-Standard.

3 Alan R. Lind, From the Lakes to the Gulf: The Illinois Central Railroad Story. Park Forest, IL: Transport History Press, 1993, p. 59.

4 The 1920s cars had signs on the doors to the engineer's cab advising passengers not to talk to the motorman, an appellation which made sense to the traveling public, accustomed as they were to motormen driving streetcars and elevated trains. Nevertheless, engineers on the IC Electric were qualified to operate steam and/or diesel locomotives, and were not happy about being equated with streetcar and rapid transit motormen.

5 The original Highliners built in the 1970s were equipped with fixed direction seats, but the second-generation Highliners delivered in 2005- 2006 came with walkover seats.

6 "Electrification of I.C. Suburban Service Completed." Railway Age, July 24, 1926.

7 "Illinois Central Officially Opens Its Electrified Suburban Service." Railway Age, August 14, 1926.

8 C.H. Mottier, "New Suburban Terminal in Use." Illinois Central Magazine,

December 1931.

9 Paul Stanford, "Electric Commuting and a Cleaner Hyde Park." Hyde Park Historical Society No. 1. Chicago: Hyde Park Historical Society, 1980, pp. 22-25.

Carol Bradford with George and Sara Anastaplo

Annual Holiday Party

The Society's annual Holiday Party took place on Saturday afternoon, December 8, 2007. Members and guests reminisced, viewed exhibits, and enjoyed holiday food.

_.._

Co-op Contribution to the Archives

The Hyde Park Historical Society is gratified by the recent donation of records and artifacts from the 75 year history of the Hyde Park Cooperative Society. The materials that have been preserved include the contents of the Co-op Library dedicated to Leon

De pres, over 50 years of Board meeting minutes, Evergreens from 1951 and other items too numerous ro cite here. The Co-op has been an integral part of Hyde Park for 75 years, and we are all saddened by its closure. However, the materials donated by the Co-op are now safely housed with the Historical Society's collection at the Special Collections Research Center of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, and will be available to the public once the acquisition has been fully recorded.

If any of our members have any Co-op related materials they would like to add to this very fine collection, please contact the Society's Archivist, Michal Safar, msafar@ameritech.net, 773-752-7723.

Hike for History 2008-

Volunteers Needed!

Saturday, May 17, 2008, will bring walkers from across the metro area to Hyde Park for a walkathon and historic rour benefiting the Chicago Metro History Education Center (CMHEC). The second annual 5km "Hike for History" will feature a guided tour of the Hyde Park community in which

participants will di cover historic highlights including the World's Columbian Exposition, the University

of Chicago, urban renewal, community churches and more. The event will showcase superior exhibits and docmnentaries of Chicago history produced by student historians for the History Fair. With more than 20,000 students participating annually, the History Fair is the oldest and largest urban history education program of its kind in the nation.

CMHEC is looking to members of the Hyde Park Historical Society for volunteers to assist in:

• Identifying and serving as tour guides for groups of 10-15 walkers. An orientation for the guides will take place the week before the hike.

• Set-up at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club where the Hike begins. This will involve registration, banding out program books, ancl eci ing upon and announcmg prizes.

To learn bow you can volunteer, contact Pauline Kochanski or Joshua Cohen of the CMHEC at

the organization's office, 312.255.3661 or email pkochanski@chicagohistoryfair.org, jcohen@ chicagohistoryfair.org. If you are interested in any aspect of the Program/Ad Book including ad sales or community history please contact either Pauline or Josh. All proceeds support CMHEC's History Fair program.

Spr ny 2008

News from the Board of Directors

At the January meeting of the Society's Board of Directors, Ruth Knack was elected co replace outgoing President Carol Bradford. The Society

thanked Carol for her dedication and commitment to the success of the Society.

Carol Vieth and Rica McCarthy were nominated and approved as new members of the Board.

Award for JPAC

Ross Petersen, whose Hyde Park roots go deep, was cited by Friends of the Parks for outstanding service to the improvement of the Jackson Park at a luncheon in the Cultural Center on February 7, 2008. Society Board members Douglas Anderson, Gary Ossewaarde, and Frances Vandervoort represented the organization at this event. At the same event, former Sch Ward Alderman and centenarian Leon Despres was cited for many years of distinguished service.

• HELP WANTED •

Society Seeks MemlJership Secretary

The Hyde Park Historical Society is seeking a new Membership Secretary.

The membership secretary is responsible for keeping the membership list up to date, maintaining a data base of members

names that can be used for printing mailing labels, and contributing to the recruitment of new members.

The current secretary, Chelsey Parrott Sheffer, is no longer able to serve in this position. The Society is grateful for her services over the past two years.

More information is available through the Society's website, www.hydeparkhistory.org

Thank you, volunteers!

The Board of Directors extends its thanks to the volunteers who helped at HPHS Headquarters over the past year. They are:

Estrella Alamar, John Allen, Rita Allen, Douglas Anderson, Bert Benade. Carol Benade. Alta Blakely, Ed Campbell, Edlyn Freerkes. Dorothy Horton, Kathy Huff, Winston Kennedy, Janice Knox, Eugene Krell,Tom McGuan, Harold Moody, Trish Morse,

Jay Mulberry, Zeus Preckwinkle, Patricia Rosenthal, Dorothy Schumacher, Richardson Spofford, Nikki Stein, Arthur Waddy, and Claude Weil.

New volunteers are always welcome, for Saturday and Sunday afternoons, 2-4 p.m. Please call Alta Blakely at 773-753-4633 to schedule a convenient date for yourself.

Well-Traveled Aitchpee

The Society has received a generous donation from Thomas L. Allen, former Hyde Parker now residing in Moretown, Vermont. The contribution is dedicated co the restoration of his 1954 yearbook, Aitchpee, of Hyde Park High School, which he has donated to the Society's Archive.

In his words, "The book has traveled from Chicago to Lake Forest, Illinois, co Grand Junction, Colorado three times, to San Luis Obispo and San Jose, California, to Tucson, Arizona, to Denver, Colorado, to Moretown, Vermont and, finally has returned home to Chicago. It has been a good trip."

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John Dunham's Madison Park

By Charlotte and John Schuerman

aving lived in our old Kenwood house for 35 years, we became interested in learning about its history. Our quest was only partially

successful, but along the way, we found out about the history of the area around it and about John Dunham, the controversial and irascible founder of Madison Park. We begin this article with Dunham and then talk about our house at the end of this article.

John H. Dunham was born May 28, 1817 in Seneca County, New York and came to Chicago in the early 1840s from his childhood home

in Waterloo, New York, working first in the wholesale grocery business.1 His biography in Chicago and Its Makers2 describes him as a

prominent member of the Board of Trade and one of the organizers in 1857 of the Merchants' Savings Loan and Trust Company bank. He was active in community affairs, a strong supporter of

the Chicago Historical Society and various not-for profit organizations and served a term in the state legislature. Dunham was one of the founders of the Republican Party of Illinois and an acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln.

In 1868 Dunham paid $4500 for twenty acres of land between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets from what is now Woodlawn to Blackstone Avenues in Hyde Park, then a suburb of Chicago, purchasing the land from the receiver of the defunct Marine Bank. At the time, what is now Dorchester

was called Madison Avenue, Blackstone was Washington, and Harper was Jefferson. Woodlawn was named as it is now. Later Dunham purchased an additional twenty acres just north, from Woodlawn to Blackstone and from Forty-ninth to Fiftieth. He subdivided the original twenty acres as Dunham's

John H. Dunham

Subdivision in 1869, laying out Madison Park as we know it now, with an oval drive between Woodlawn and Dorchester Avenues enclosing a private park

for the owners of the lots facing it. The lots on both sides of Madison Park and on the south side of 50th Street were 25 feet wide by 150 feet deep.

Dunham incurred the wrath of his neighbors on many occasions over his plans for the property. He took great offense at this, frequently threatening lawsuits and sometimes making good on those threats. In its 1876 edition, the Chicago Daily Trib1tne3 reported a lawsuit by Dunham against the village of Hyde Park because it had condemned part of his land to widen 51st Street. The suit was settled with an agreement that the village would

take only nine feet (rather than the original 17 feet) and would pay Dunham $8,000. In 1891 Dunham was back in court over a similar issue, this time suing the city of Chicago (which had annexed Hyde Park in 1889). Dunham wanted to keep the city from condemning another eight feet to widen ►@

«O 51st Street. Further, he claimed that Hyde Park had never given him the $8,000, and he wanted that, plus interest, from Chicago. We

have been unable to determine the outcome of th is lawsuit.

Dunham annoyed Paul Cornell, the founder of Hyde Park, by specifying that the houses on the south side of Madison Park face the park, rather than 51st Street. Cornell owned land south of 51st Street that would have to face the back sides of those houses. A number of prominent men in Chicago were building elegant residences in the area, some of them on the west side of Woodlawn between 49th and 50th Streets, facing Dunham's northern tract. Most prominent were houses built

by A. G. Spaulding, baseball magnate and founder of the Spaulding sporting goods comp'any, and Judge Van H. Higgins. These individuals, along with Paul Cornell, wanted to extend Kimbark

and Kenwood Avenues through Madison Park, a move that would have altered Dunham's plans

considerably. Rather than plead for the esthetics of his plan for Madison Park, Dunham said extending the streets would mean more as essments and taxes and, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune of August 21, 1891, "he was only a poor millionaire with a family to support."4 He built a greenhouse on 50th Street in the path of one of the proposed streets. The Chicago Daily Tribttne of July 31, 1890, under a subhead "The Feud Between J .H. Dunham and His Neighbors Goes Merrily On" says that

he had built "half a dozen rough one-story pine cottages at the Fiftieth street end of his tract. They were dreadful looking objects and cost about $500 each."5 He threatened to build more such cottages on Woodlawn facing his up-scale neighbors and to "import a colony of [N}egroes." Some later accounts of the events suggest more beneficent motives on the part of Dunham: that he was building needed housing for workingmen.

The Chicago Daily Tribune of August 21, 1891 reported that Dunham had built three ugly barns on 51st Street, close to Dorchester, which were used for dwellings. These properties were vandalized

on several occasions, with suspicion centering on local property holders. Dunham proceeded to erect a seven foot "spite fence" on 51st to protect his property, further aggravating the neighbors. The following interchange, reported in the Tribune, exemplifies tension between neighbors:

"I wottldn't trouble myself about the shanties," said a Kenwood lady to Mr. Spaulding recently. "They are not permanent."

"Well, I'm not pernzanent myself, madam," replied the baseball magnate. 5

Apparently part of the source of the most recent dispute was that Judge Higgins had gotten the city council to pass an ordinance requiring the property owners on Woodlawn to pay for sidewalks on both sides of the street and Dunham had to pay for

his side. Whatever his motives, Dunham appears

to have gotten the best of his dispute with his neighbors. He did not live on his property in Hyde Park, instead residing on Michigan Avenue, where he also caused trouble-his house there created

an obstacle preventing the Congress Hotel from expanding. He died April 28, 1893, specifying in his will that his property should not be sold until the death of the last of his heirs. He is buried in the family plot at Graceland Cemetery. At the time of his death his estate was valued at $1,510,000, real estate comprising all but $10,000 of this total.6 Heirs included his wife, Elizabeth (Hills), and two daughters, Helen (Lizzie) who married Judge Kirk Hawes, and Mary Virginia who remained unmarried until her death in 1928.

Farmer's Field

A 10-acre plot of land between Dorchester and Kimbark Avenues and 49th to 50th Streets was known to local residents as Dunham's cow pasture. Dunham planned to build a number of small cheap houses on the property to rent to working men.

Due to strong opposition from wealthy neighbors, the plan had to be dropped. Dunham was not

one to give in easily to public pressure and was determined to keep the land as a "farm and cow pasture to the discomfiture of the neighbors."7 As mentioned above, his will stipulated that the land not be sold until his last heir died. This tied up the property for thirty-five years. The death of Dunham's daughter, Mary Virginia, in 1928

opened the door for development. Developers were very interested in the land and one plan included

a 10 million dollar luxury apartment building.8 By the time the negotiations got underway the

building boom was over. Ultimately there was only one bidder, Albert W. Harris of the Harris Trust and Savings bank. Harris owned a home adjacent

to the land and gave the property as a gift to the school board on the condition that it be maintained as a playground. The school board did not abide by the terms of the deed and ultimately it was turned over to the city to be maintained by the Bureau of Parks.9 Today, although officially "Kenwood Park,"

is affectionately called "Farmer's Field" by local residents.

Apartments on 51 st street

Contrary to Dunham's will, a few sales of his property were recorded prior to Mary Virginia's death in 1928. The last remnants of the "spite fence" were removed in 1917 with the sale of 600 feet of frontage on Hyde Park Boulevard.10 John Carroll purchased the property from Florence D.

The Fence on51st Street

(Hawes) Chivers, John Dunham's granddaughter and wife of Arthur J. Chivers, with the intent

to sell to builders for the development of high grade apartment buildings. With that sale, the stipulation that all improvements face the park was dropped. Buildings could now face both Madison Park and Hyde Park Boulevard.l l

50th Street

Between 1890 and 1895 the landscape on 50th Street changed. The annexation in 1889 of Hyde Park to Chicago, the Columbian Exposition in 1893, and the establishment of the University of Chicago in 1892 provided a stimulus for rapid growth during the period of 1890-1910. The 1895 Sanborn fire map shows 16 new brick two-story

connected houses in two separate groups on 50th Street.l2 Eight of these houses had stone fronts and eight did not. All had basements. The 1894 Chicago B!tte Book, a directory listing socially prominent residents, contained the names of 19 individuals on 50th Street. It appears that many of

these residents lived on Fiftieth Street for two years or less, only two individuals were in both the 1894 and 1897 editions. Several of the residents had moved to homes in other parts of Kenwood. The 1925 Sanborn fire map shows most of the buildings found today in Madison Park and on Fiftieth Street. The architects for these buildings included George Williams, Morrison and Fuller, and William Pruyn.13

1229 E. 50th Street

Our house at 1229 East 50th Street (the original street number was 200) occupies plots 38 and 39 of Dunham's Subdivision. It is a frame house with

Eastlake details, steep gables, decorated bargeboard, a tall decorative chimney, and stick style framing.14 It contains a great deal of oak woodwork, including an elaborate staircase in the entrance hall and

wain coting in the dining room. Large passageways into the parlors can be closed off with decorative oak pocket doors. The newel posts on the staircase have carved lilies and other decorative motifs. In the dining room are three clear glass windows extending to the floor. Above the windows are colored glass windows with hand-painted glass roundels of painted birds, fruit, and fish. The house originally had a large front porch across the front, and there is a brick basement. The exterior is clad by narrow four-inch clapboards with detailing (many of the detailed clapboards have been replaced with ordinary four inch stock). The house is painted grey

with black trim. We do not know its original color.

We have made great efforts to track the history of this house and remain baffled by certain problems regarding its origin. We believe that it dates back to the 1880s, given its character and

its construction (for example, it has framing in the original dimensions, 2 x 6 lumber is 2 inches by

6 inches), evidence of gas lights, and heating from fireplaces. Grates in the floor allow upstairs rooms to receive heat from the first floor. In Hyde Park Homes,15 Jean Block dates the house to before 1890. But there are inconsistencies in the record. The 1895 Sanborn fire map does not show a house at this location. l6 In addition, the first recording of

an action concerning this property is from 1901, when a permit was issued for a basement. Also, ►0

Summer 2008

-<@ we find no record of anyone living at this address in early Chicago Blttebooks or Hyde Park Directories. It is possible that the present house was moved to chis location from someplace else, as often happened in those days. Unfortunately, records of building permits of this period have been lost.

Although we have been unable to definitively crack the origins of our house, we will continue to enjoy it, as we have for the past 35 years.

We appreciate the assistance of staff at Special Collections and the Map Department of the University of Chicago Library, the Chicago History Mmettm, the Ryerson and Bttrnham Libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago,

and the Map Department of the University of Illinois, Urbana in locating materials.

Charlotte Schuerman may be reached at ckschuerman 1 @yahoo.com

Republicans in Hyde Park

After the Civil War, Hyde Park officials and the community at large made no secret of their adherence to the Republican Party in state and national elections. Republicanism meant a good deal to Hyde Parkers' self-image in the 1860s, for it gave them national pretensions ... Hyde Park's Republican consensus was graphically demonstrated time and time again at the polls. Ninety percent of the town's voters cast their ballots for Lincoln in 1864, and 97 percent chose Republican candidates in the 1866 election, making Hyde Park the most Republican community in Cook County in the mid-sixties.

Hyde Park History, Hyde Park Politics: 1861-1919, Hyde Park Historical Society, No. 2, 1980.

1 Josiah S. Currey, Chicago: Its History and Its Builders. Chicago: S. J. Clark Publishing Co., 1912, v. 4, pp. 240-45, 1912.

2 Paul T. Gilbert and Charles L. Bryson, Chicago and Its Makers. Chicago: F. Mendelsohn, 1929. See also America's Successful Men of Affairs. volume 2, Henry Hall, ed., New York: The New York Tribune, 1896, p. 266-67.

3 "The Courts" column, Chicago Daily Tribune, March 10, 1876. Old issues of the Chicago Daily Tribune may be accessed through ProQuest.

4 "Hyde Park's Fence War," Chicago Daily Tribune, August 21, 1891.

5 "Ibid." Chicago Daily Tribune, August 21, 1891.

6 "Will of John H. Dunham," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 11, 1893.

7 "Children Play on City Farm Worth Millions," Chicago Daily Tribune,

Sept. 2, 1951.

8 "Dunham's Cow Pasture May be Apartments," Chicago Daily Tribune,

April 3, 1930.

9 "Children Play on City Farm Worth Millions," Chicago Daily Tribune,

Sept. 2, 1951.

10 "Apartments to be Erected on Dunham Tract," Chicago Daily Tribune, March 25, 1917.

11 "Old Board Fence on Boulevard to be Torn Down," Chicago Daily Tribune, April 8, 1917.

12 Most of the Sanborn fire maps may be found at the Chicago History Museum. They were developed for insurance purposes.

13 Jean Block, Hyde Park Houses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 137-38 quoting American Contractor, Construction News and Chicago Historic Resources Survey, City of Chicago, Department of Planning and Development, 1986 and 1992.

14 See the Chicago Historic Resources Survey, 1986 and 1992. The National Builder describes some of the architectural features of the house, see "Details in Building," August 1887. See also Carl

F. Schmidt, The Victorian Era in the United States. Scottsville, NY: Author, 1971 and James C. Massey and Shirley Maxwell, House Styles in America. New York: Penguin Studio, 1996.

15 Block, Hyde Park Houses, pp. 39, 137.

16 This Sanborn map (1895, volume 14, sheets 73 and 74) is at the Map Department of the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Contributions Honor Alice Schlessinger

The following people have generously contributed to the Hyde Park Historical Society in honor of Alice Schie singer, who passed away on January 7, 2008.

Peg Anderson

Ann Becker & David Muschler Howard, Phyllis, Lauren & Dana Cohn Charles A. Dale

Judith A. Derain Nick DiGiovanni

Mary Jo & William Fairbanks Ethel Goldsmith

Edward & Stacey Hamburg Mr. & Mrs. Steve Hanauer Michael Levy

Paulette Lieb

Adam & Debra Natenshon Rita & Kitty Picken Juliette Richman Matthew & Gail Smith Nikki Stein

T. A. Warshell Neurine E. Wiggin

Mary Wilcox & Catherine Wertjes

The Speakeasy

By Bert Benade

This is a story about Hyde Park, a couple of its interesting citizens, and Prohibition.

A few years ago Charles Beck, a long retired doctor in his 90's and fellow volunteer at the Museum of Science and Industry, came up to me and said, "You're with the Hyde Park Historical Society, aren't you?" When I answered affirmatively, he asked if I knew who John Pershing was. I said he was the first U.S. five-scar general and chat his parents were buried in Oak Woods Cemetery. Charles said I was the person who needed to hear chis story.

When he finished I encouraged him to write it up for our Society's Newsletter. He agreed to, but I

couldn't get him to act. One day, after I had pestered him several times he said he'd give me a tape to transcribe. When I listened to it I realized it had been done quickly, almost in telegraph-eze. So the following recital is a mix of the tape and what he had told me earlier. Charles passed on a little while ago so this story is written in his memory.

In 1930 or 1931, when Charles was a teenager of 16 or 17, his parents bought a house on South Cornell Avenue (at 5242, I believe). The house was up against the Illinois Central Railroad embankment. They bought it from the estate of the senior Pershings.

Being curious about his new home, Charles went on his own tour of the three-story house and became interested in the circular tower with a cupola at

the house's southwest corner. When he got to the basement and looked into the room under the tower, he was puzzled. The room was lined with wooden, crisscrossed racks obviously meant for wine bottles, except for one area, which had a water valve handle in the middle of a blank section of the wall. When he looked at the ceiling he saw it had an old style galvanized showerhead hanging down. Having a young boy's curiosity, he started to open the valve gingerly. Nothing happened, so he kept on turning

the handle. Suddenly the blank wall started swinging out on one side. He couldn't see into the cavity where the wall had been, so went upstairs to find a flashlight.

While rummaging around, his mother asked what he was doing, so the two of them went to the room, flashlight in hand. All they could see was a jagged hole leading to a tunnel. The tunnel seemed to head west under the Illinois Central embankment. It was full of cobwebs and had very rough sides, so Charles's mother forbade him to look any further.

At this point I'll stop the story to remind the reader

General John"Black Jack" Pershing, undated U. S. Army photo

that until urban renewal and well after Prohibition, Lake Park Avenue between 47th and 55th Streets was well west of the railroad embankment. On the west side of Lake Park Avenue was the Blackstone Library and on the east at about 49th Street was the Harding Museum. South of the museum was a row of three story apartments with stores at street level. Among those stores were bars, the local police station, the original Morton's Steakhouse, the first venue of the Compass Players, and the original Valois Restaurant.

Now back to the story.

You must understand that at the time of this account, prohibition was in full swing and people who wanted to drink privately had problems carrying booze home. People like the Pershings went to great lengths to hide their activities. So it seems that the Pershings had worked out a deal with the established speakeasy on the west side of the embankment, which as luck would have it was immediately across from the Pershing home. They had a tunnel dug between their liquor storage room and had a door built into the basement of the speakeasy. No one could see them bringing alcohol home.

When I told this story to Len Despres, he said at that time he had known five or six speakeasies in our community. I had the diplomacy not to ask if he had been a patron of any of them. ►Ci)

Summer 2008

«(it Correction and addenda

It turns out that there is more to this tale than young Charles was aware of. It turns out that the Pershing Seniors may have owned the house with

the tunnel, but they probably never lived in it. Their home was over the dry goods/clothing store they owned on the south side of 53rd Street, between Kenwood and Kimbark Avenues where Nichols Park faces 53rd Street today. It was almost directly across from the YMCA, where the General's father was involved in programs, both in his home and at the Y.

At least two of the General's siblings attended the University of Chicago, and one of his brothers is buried with the senior Pershings at Oak Woods Cemetery. .

So it turns out that Charles Beck's story needs an answer for who built the tunnel. It raises interesting questions about the Pershing family and their role in our community.

Archives Committee Activities

Archives Committee Chairman Michal Safar reports the following Committee activities:

Lee Murdock sings songs of the Great Lakes andby Henry Clay Work at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club, April 13, 2008.

Volunteers Needed

The Hyde Park Historical always welcomes volunteers to staff the Society's headquarters on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 2-4. For more information, please call Alta Blakely at

(7T) 75 -4633.

1. The Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago has picked up remaining

materials from both the Hyde Park Cooperative

Society and from Nancy Hays' apartment. Additional materials related to the Co-op are now being sought from former Co-op board members.

2. Committee members Mark Mandie and Doug Anderson are eager to begin work on the Society's Oral History Project and are looking for suggestions for people to interview. More information can be provided by contacting Michal Safar at (773) 752-4412 or msafar@ameritech.net.

3. Rebecca Graff of the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology has begun excavating sites in Jackson Park that may hold artifacts from

the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Old utility conduits, and fragments of metal, glass, and pottery have already been identified.

New Membership Coardinator

Claude Weil has generously and enthusiastically agreed to assume the responsibility of membership coordinator for the Society. Thank you, Claude.

Hiking For History

On Saturday, May 17, 2008, more than 100 history buffs from all over the Chicago area hiked 5 kilometers to view some of Hyde Park's best-known landmarks. This event helped support the annual history fair the Chicago Metro History Education Center.

Encouraged on their way by State Representative Barbara Flynn Currie and 4th Ward Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, walkers visited the Hyde Park Union Church, the Henry Moore sculpture commemorating the world's first controlled nuclear reaction, and

such sites as the Robie House, Midway Plaisance, and the Doctors' Hospital of Hyde Park. At

Niles West High School students (in alphabetical order) Amy Amin, KaitlynFleming, Elaine Kim(not pictured) Jasmine Ramahi, prepared thisproject. Joshua Cohen, classroom instructor, is shown at the left.

Brook Borowiak describes how the atomic age began on the University of Chicago campus.

HPHS Headquarters they enjoyed award-winning presentations by students about the 1893 Columbian Exposition and Chicago's role in the Atomic Age.

Kathy Huff of the Society's Program Committee was a key organizer of this important event. Rita Allen, Carol Bradford, Janice Knox, Rita McCarthy, Gary

Os ewaarde, Frances Vandervoort, and Carol Vieth of the Society and Maryhelen Matijevic, assistant principal of Mt. Carmel High School, volunteered at HPHS headquarters. Joshua Cohen, Pauline Kochanski, Lisa Oppenheim, of the CMHEC, and Krystal Johnson, CMHEC's executive director led city-wide efforts to make the program a success.

Encouragement came also from former 5th Ward Alderman Leon M. Despres and current 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston. !Ilin

Mark your calendar!

UPCOMING

[V[NJ

On Saturday, June 21, 2008, Society members are invited to visit the

First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, 6400 South Kimbark, at 2:00 PM.

Society member Diane Luhmann will recognize the 175th anniversary of the church by speaking about its history and role in the Woodlawn Community. Her talk will be followed by a tour of the church.

Summer 2008

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INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF CHICAGO:

1955-1970

This is the third installment of a talk, given by Claude Weil of the Hyde Park Historical Society, on March 6, 2002. Claude was a resident of International House in 1955-56, and Associate Director of Business Affairs from 1983 until 1996 when he retired. International House celebrated its

75th anniversary in 2007. This report will continue in future issues of Hyde Park History.

became a resident of International House in January, 1955. I am certain that the impact of this event on the House was absolutely trivial, but its

impact on me was tremendous: I should say it was seminal. My oldest friends stem from my fourteen months there and it offered totally new vistas to me as presumably it has for many others who have lived there. While the life style wasn't grand, it was comfortable, and room size and appointments were adequate. At the time, we might have had

a typewriter (maybe electric), a radio, a clock and an electric razor. We did not have computers, CD

players, television sets, VCRs, hair dryers, answering machines, coffee makers, microwaves, and other paraphernalia whose demands for space and electricity would have been difficult to satisfy in the 1930s-style rooms. To some of the foreign residents, they offered a lot more private space than they were used to. We had daily maid service, amenities like a barber and beauty shop, and dry cleaner, none of which exist today. We did not have telephones in the rooms, but had buzzers sounded by the switchboard operator if we had a call. We'd buzz back and dash to the telephone booth at the end of the hall. If we didn't respond, messages were left on our mailboxes.

At the time, the sexes were still segregated but there were open houses each quarter during which we could visit each other's rooms. These occasions were marked by a considerable consumption of alcohol. Otherwise, if we wanted to have a party, a room on the national

In this 1955 photo, Isabelle Frey, Claude Weil, and Mrs. Samors (left to right) celebrate with Dale Cleaver (far right), who has just received a PhD in art history.

(second) floor could be reserved where there was also a kitchen which residents could use when they wanted to prepare a special meal. Breakfasts and dinners in the public dining room were congenial and there

was always an interesting mix of people to sit with.

After dinner several tables of bridge would often be

in action in the main lounge with players sitting in or dropping out when called by their books.

Residents attended various schools in the Chicago area such as the Illinois Institute of Technology and Roosevelt U niversicy which, at the time, could not offer desirable housing to their students. In 1967-68, the House had a 52% foreign student and a 48% American occupancy. Various companies had trainees from abroad in residence. Inland Steel, for instance, had a program for Indians. The corridors of the House were often redolent with the smell of curry even though cooking in one's room was strictly prohibited. ►@

-<O In November, 1957, the House celebrated its 25th anniversary with a gala dinner. David Rockefeller was the honored guest. Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton attended, as did Dean of Students Robert Strozier

who had been associated with the House and the University for many years before becoming President of Florida State University. During this period, the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, Lord Kilmuir, was a visitor. A group of representatives of Russian student councils visited, firm in the conviction that Russia would eventually outstrip our country. Some less doctrinaire Russian student newspaper editors also visited. Another highlight occurred when Queen Elizabeth's motorcade stopped in front of the House to pick up Chancellor Kimpton before visiting the campus.

In the early 60s, Prime Minister Lester'Pearson of Canada was the featured speaker at a three-day

conference on world tensions. A luncheon was given for sixty ambassadors and permanent representatives to the United Nations. The International Players, a drama group, was organized and gave performances for the next two or three years. A long-lasting group that came into being was the Foreign Wives Association. It helped orient these newcomers to life in America and the big city. A camera club also made its appearance.

Another program of interest was the Washington

Seminar organized by the Foreign Student Service Council. This program enabled students to visit the nation's capital and meet with government officials. In the first year they visited Senator Paul Douglas, Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas, former

Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, and Thomas Foley, representative from Washington State who later became Speaker of the House. They also toured the White House. This program continued for several years.

During the early and mid-sixties, the Great Society program, initiated by President Lyndon Johnson after the assassination of President Kennedy, gave impetus to all sorts of programs in Chicago and beyond.

Organizations like the Agency for International Development supported programs held at the House.

Early in the 1960s, there was concern about deferred maintenance, and a committee was set up under the chairmanship of Albert Pick, Jr., owner of the Pick Hotel chain, to study the problem. The committee eventually authorized a program costing nearly $1,000,000 to refurbish sleeping rooms, update elevators, replace some plumbing stacks,

air-condition the cafeteria, and make a multitude of other improvements. The idea of building an annex for married students where the tennis courts are currently located was considered but not acted on. Although no mention is made of it in the House minutes, in 1963, the Center for Continuing

Education was opened across the Midway to provide alternate accommodations for conference groups and university guests. Some groups which had met at the House moved their programs to the Center but, by and large, its opening did not have a major impact on International House.

Other changes occurring at the time included the unionization of the cafeteria and housekeeping employees. Security guards were hired. The House still had a resident house physician, Dr. Wagner, but when he died this service was discontinued.

Occupancy was nearly 100 percent in the Autumn Quarter and averaged close to 90 percent during Winter and Spring Quarters. But the cafeteria operated with substantial deficits as did the gift shop and valet service. Eventually, the Szabo Company was hired to manage the cafeteria.

By 1965, the valet service had been discontinued, as had the barber shop operation, in part, it is said, because long hair had become fashionable for men!!! In spite of these problems, the House Board saw no need to engage in fund-raising, as did the New York House, which needed substantial outside support to make ends meet. The House had surpluses for most of the 60s. In 1959, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., gave the House an additional gift of more than $700,000. Money for fellowships came from such organizations as the Gulbenkian and Danforth Foundations.

In the latter part of the sixties, there is little to be seen in documents relating to the House that

Aulumn 2008

reflect the turbulence on many campuses. No I-House residents were involved in the 1969 sit-ins at the University's Administration Building. Representatives of the Black Panther party were invited to talk about the group's activities.

In September, 1969, Jack Kerridge retired as Director and was replaced by David Utley.

Beginning in 1970, members of the Resident Council were invited to attend meetings of the Board of Governors and the staff. Another sign of changing times was a request for open visitation between the men's and women's floors. By 1972, co-ed floors had been started.

After the flush sixties, the House started having substantial deficits caused in part by increased labor costs. A resident-operated coffee hpuse had a negative impact on income for food services.

Among cost cutting measures were the elimination of an engineer and painter, and the reduction of maid service from five to two days a week. A major improvement was that, for the first time, residents

The Board of Governors increasingly viewed fund raising as something the House would have to do. However, the University declined to have the House participate in its 1972 capital campaign. It should be noted, that until recent years, the House was financially independent from the University and had to pay for services rendered by various departments.

A public relations manager was hired to put out a newsletter and develop better relations with I

House alumni. A card file listing former residents was created from applications that went back to the House's opening.

Director David Utley resigned at the end of 1974, and in January, 1975, Zoltan Tomory from Harvard University assumed the position. InJuly 1977, after a brief period of resurgence, Tomory left and Maynard Krueger, Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department, became acting director. (To be continued.)

cnm

had telephones in their rooms, operated through the University's Centrex system. Among programs

started in 1970 was an urban seminar for foreign students that introduced them to the problems of race

relations, housing, drug abuse, urban development, and counterculture life styles. nfortunately, many such innovative and popular programs were short lived. Interest in programs ebbed and flowed with changes in the resident body, the staff, and the Board of Governors. For instance, the popular Festival of Nations, which had thrived through the mid-sixties, lapsed, was briefly revived in 1973, but lapsed again.

This may have been due to the continuing decline in the House's foreign student population, which dropped from 34 percent in 1973 to 26 percent in

the early 80s. These trends paralleled the University s foreign student enrollment. Fortunately, in 1983, the Festival of Nations was revived and has been offered continuously since then.

Economic problems continued in the mid-seventies. Consideration was given to turning over the operation of the cafeteria to the University, creating resident kitchens, or offering food from automated machines. By 1973, the House resumed management of the cafeteria. A study performed by Professor Kubert of the Graduate School of Business and his students, suggested instituting a meal plan with a quarterly service fee. This was done but was unpopular with

the residents since many of them didn't return from campus to the House for lunch. During that summer, for some years, the food service was closed entirely.

In 1975, maid service was eliminated though linen service continued to be provided.

Church Tour

About 40 Society members were welcomed to the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, 6400

South Kimbark Avenue, on Sunday afternoon, June 21, 2008, by Society and Church member Diane Luhman. Diane described the history and role in the community of the Church, which was dedicated in 1833, the same year Chicago was founded as a city. Her talk was followed by a tour of this impressive structure.

Don't Dump on Hyde Park

In the 1860s, Chicago's garbage was collected by garbage collectors driving down the thoroughfares of Chicago clanging bells to notify property owners to have garbage tubs or buckets ready for pickup or be liable for a three-dollar fine. But collecting refuse from one section often meant dumping it in another less thickly settled part of the city.

By 1867 the citizens of Hyde Park, trespassed upon to the point of exasperation, protested against the use made of their section to deposit "every species of filthy and decaying matter, from loads of night soil to dead animals of all descriptions."

Chicago Tribune,January 29, 1866,June 11, 1867.

Au umn 2008

A Mormon Presence at the Columbian Exposition

Joan Sessions with FSV

In the latter half of the 19th Century, a small group of Mormon settlers in Utah hoped

to establish a silk industry. They raised silkworms and wove the delicate threads into gleaming fabric. Joan Sessions, a long-time Hyde Parker who spent many years working in what is now the Center for

Urban School Improvement of

the University of Chicago and now teaches educational psychology at Loyola University, recently gave the Society two mementoes of the Utah

silk industry and tells the following tale:

In 1893, her grandmother, Eleanor Pyper, came to the Exposition from Salt Lake City to exhibit her

silk at the Columbian Exposition, possibly when the award-winning Mormon Tabernacle Choir came to

Society members march in Hyde Park's annual July 4 parade.

sing. George D. Pyper, an elder brother of Eleanor was in charge of the Mormon agricultural exhibits at the Fair. He was first tenor at the Salt Lake City Opera, and sang in the Choir. Grandmother Pyper's

silk was displayed in a glass case in the family's living room when Ms. Sessions was a child. The Pypers were

a prominent Mormon family who had emigrated from Scotland and settled in Utah.

When Grandmother Pyper came to Chicago to show her goods, she was issued the photo ID and possibly the brass pin shown here.

These are all facets of the amazing history of the Great Columbian Exposition. Imm

Au.umn 2008

We Inherit the Present Book Review

By Sen. Paul Douglas

(Reprinted with the permission of the Hyde Park Herald)

Senator Paul Douglas wrote the following editorial for publication in the Golden Jubilee issue of the Hyde Park Herald in 1939 when he was Fifth Ward alderman.

Within the confines of the few square blocks constituting the community of Hyde Park have lived men who made civilizations. Chicago, the Middle West, and the nation as a whole, have embraced

the literature, the art, the scientific discoveries, the industrial and political programs wh,ich were first conceived and executed in Hyde Park. The

contributions to the life of America we will remember, and the men who made them we will honor during

the period of out Golden Jubilee celebration.

This tribute we pay to the past is not mere ancestor worship. Nor does it reflect community arrogance.

What we single out from the yesterdays to admire mirrors the values and hopes we hold in the present. And thus viewed, honor to the great deeds and names appear more approximately as merely an occasion when we say to ourselves, "Thus far - well done."

In the growth of our community consciousness, quickened by the Jubilee, we do not mean to hold ourselves apart from the City of Chicago. On the contrary, the Jubilee event heralds the occasion of our annexation to the city. But the growth of local community consciousness is a necessary prelude to the assumption of leadership in the larger city which surrounds us. In that larger city, we have sought

honesty and efficiency in civic affairs. But we have not limited our attention to mere administrative reforms. We have led the way in the formulation of social policies to aid the underdog in his struggle for life.

By our records we have shown the American way at its best. Honest, but without undue self righteousness, energetic but tolerant, thrifty but compassionate, we have not only built up a beautiful community, but we have built understanding friendships between the various religious and racial groups of which we are composed.

The city of Chicago and our nation which we love, will have the need of these qualities in the difficult years which lie ahead. I am confident that Hyde Park will, in the future as it has in the past, adhere to the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for orderly progress. If our Golden Jubilee but quickens our determination to the faithful to the spirit by which our friends and predecessors have lived, it will have

served a worthy and noble purpose. We shall inherit the present with equanimity. Clim

Joel Greenberg, whose book, A Natural History of the Chicago Region (University of Chicago Press, 2002), created a stir among local birdwatchers and nature lovers, has produced another book, 0/ Prairie, Woods, and Water (University of Chicago 2008). For this fascinating volume, Greenberg has selected and edited works by dozens of writers who have written about Chicago's natural settings. Carl Schurz and Theodore Dreiser write eloquently about, respectively, the wild prairie and a nearby river. Native plants are lovingly detailed by Henry C. Cowles and May T. Watts. Dr.

William T. Beecher, former director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, tells of American egrets in the Chicago region. Closer to Hyde Park is a tale about "A Day's Hunting in 1871 on the Grounds of the South Shore Country Club."

This book provides a broad spectrum of ways to look at a world sometimes as close as our own back yards. It would be a fine addition to any library. FSV

A 11 I ll rn n 2 0 0 8

August Home Tour a Success

On August 3, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon approximately 70 people enjoyed the Society's annual Home Tour. Houses visited were the 1902 house of Lisa and Nate Eimer at 4825 S. Woodlawn Avenue designed by Hugh M. G. Garden with Richard Schmidt for Dr. Lester Frankenchal; the house of Janice and Richardson Spofford at 4815 S. Woodlawn,

Janice Spofford greets guests at 4815 S. Woodlawn

Stairs at 1229 East 50th Street

Fireplace at 4825 S. Woodlawn

Breakfast room at 4804 S. Woodlawn

designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw and built in 1910 for Thomas E. Wilson; the house of Noel and Jon Mickelson at 4804 S. Woodlawn, designed by Horatio R. Wilson and built in 1910 for Robert McDougal; and the only wooden frame house on the tour, the home of Charlotte and John Schuerman at 1229 E. 50th Street, designed in the early 1890s by an unknown architect for John Dunham, wholesale grocer, banker, and real estate developer.

As members and guests explored these century-old houses, it was difficult not to reflect upon these homes to be bastions of stability in a changing city and nation.

Au umn 2008

Archives Committee Highlights

The Committee is promoting the Oral History Initiative and is seeking suggestions about people to interview.

A letter has been sent to Leon Despres informing him of the donation of materials by the Hyde Park Cooperative Society, and asking him to consider donating to the Society any materials he has from his years as general counsel to the Coop.

Stephen Treffman has donated 12 boxes of material to the Committee, and Committee Chairman Michal Safar is doing a preliminary review of these materials. The Committee plans to send selected aterials to the

U. of C.'s Dept. of Special Collections.

The Committee is pleased to welcome Lisa Calahan as a new member.

Society seeks Cornell and Despres Award Nominations

Members of the Hyde Park Historical Society are invited to submit nominations for the 2008 Paul Cornell Awards and the Leon and Miriam Despres

Awards, named after Hyde Park's founder, recognize individuals and organizations whose work exemplify the values and objectives of the Society. This includes recording Hyde Park's history, preserving Hyde Park artifacts and documents, and promoting public interest in Hyde Park history, and education. Despres Awards are given for preserving the built environment, including renovation and reconstruction of homes, historical buildings, and other architectural structures.

Please send names and addresses of nominees for Cornell Awards to the Hyde Park Historical, 5529

S. Lake Park Avenue, Chicago, IL 60615, www. hydeparkhiscory.org, or to Frances Vandervoort, 5471 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60615, Tel: (773) 752- 374, or by e-mail: vandersand@sbcglobal.net. Send Despres Award nominations to the Hyde Park

Historical Society or to Jack Spicer, 5536 S. Kimbark Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, Tel: (773) 324-5476, ore

Awards, which will be presented at the annual dinner of the Society in early 2008. The Cornell

mail: jackspicer@earchlink.net. All nominations must be received by November 15, 2007.

Mark your calendar!

UPCOMING

[VINTS

Oak Woods Cemetery, Saturday, September 13, 2008, 1:00 PM-3:15 PM. Meet at the cemetery's main entrance, 1035 East 67th Street. Make arrangements for car-pooling, if desired, either individually or by contacting Rita Allen, Program Chairman, 493-0444. Watch for a postcard or check the HPHS website for final details. Accommodations will be made for those who plan to limit their walking at this expansive site.

Mary Ann Johnson, Sunday, October 19, 2008, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM at the Historical Society's headquarters. Ms. Johnson co-authored the book, Women Building Chicago: 1790-1990, and will describe her upcoming book about the women's movement, 1960-1980. More details will be provided by postcard and on the Society's website.

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VOL.31 NO. 1

Former Fifth Ward Alderman Leon Despres,

Hyde Park-Kenwood is the place that also nurtured and

' who received a special

produced the first female African

Cornell Award from the Hyde Park Historical Society at the 2008 membership, dinner, concluded his acceptance statement by reflecting upon Hyde Parkers who had served in public office over the years. He ended by saying that, "next year I might see a Hyde Parker in

the White House." On January 20, when Hyde Parker and former U.S. Senator Barack Obama takes the oath of office, this will be true at last.

What follows are contributions by several Society members about the significance of Mr.

Obama's election victory.

•7· Timuel D. Black, civil rights leader, historian and educator

On November 4th, 2008, Hyde Park-Kenwood residents and their friends could shout and yell wherever they were that one of their neighbors, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, had been elected to be the 44th President of the United States of America. It was beautiful and thrilling, not only because President-Elect Obama is

a resident of Hyde Park-Kenwood, is an African-American of mixed

racial heritage, and has a brilliant, beautiful wife Michelle with an American slavery ancestry. Wow! Just three generations from slavery to the White House.

Such success of both President-Elect Obama and bis wife proves that America can be beautiful, especially if you live in Hyde Park-Kenwood.

American U.S. Senator in the person of Carol Moseley Braun. The first black mayor of Chicago, the late Harold Washington,

was a resident of Hyde Park Kenwood. On January 20, 2009, President-Elect Barack Obama will officially be sworn in as President of the United States by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. However, he bas already begun to publicly announce and present his choices for important positions for his administration. As he has publicly stated very often, he intends to "hit the ground running" on issues like foreign policy, jobs, taxes, housing, health, education, etc. As one who before he publicly launched his political career, advised him on tactics he could use in community organizing, I know that when he chooses "the ground" he wants to "run" on he "runs" very fast in order to reach his goals quickly. All along the way he has had excellent trainers and coaches to help him succeed. On January 20th, 2009, he will be at the starting point as a long distance runner to reach the goals of peace, harmony, and prosperity not only for citizens of the United

States, but for other deserving, needy people of the world.

We in Hyde Park-Kenwood are also long distance, political runners having produced such liberal stalwarts as Leon Despres, Studs Terkel, the late Senator Paul Douglas, Illinois State Representative Bob Mann, retired

U.S. Justice Abner Mikv'a, former U.S. Senator Carol ►4j

<O Moseley Braun, and the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, just co name a few.

President Barack Obama is the beneficiary of the legacies of these great personalities. He faces the challenges not only of the issues he has outlined, but also of perpetuating and expanding the history and goals of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community that started him on his historic success. The whole world is watching.

. : Barbara Flynn Currie, Illinois State Representative from the 25th Congressional District since 1979 and House Majority Leader since 1997

I was thrilled to support Barack Obama when he tossed his hat in the ring for State Senator from the 13th district. Barack handily won the seat in 1996, and the political center of his lakefront district was Hyde Park.

Barack's predecessors, Richard Newhouse and Alice Palmer, were pretty impressive. State Representatives serving the same territory included Bob Mann, Abner Mikva, and Carol Moseley Braun. Carol went on co become a United States Senator and an ambassador.

Ab served in the United States Congress, on the Federal Court of Appeals, and in the White House as General Counsel.

Barack was pretty impressive, coo. He was a thoughtful, dynamic advocate for progressive causes and, as the nation would discover during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a supremely gifted orator with the potential co inspire the nation co move beyond che divisive, counter-productive politics of

the past. In Springfield, he worked effectively with colleagues from all parts of the state and both political parties to get things done for our community.

And now he's poised to become President of the United States of America. Hyde Park has spawned many first-rate political leaders. But to spawn the President of the United States? It's no wonder we're busting our buttons! It's no wonder we can't get that smile off our face.

Thank you, Barack. And thank you, America.

Former Fifth Ward Alderman Leon M. Despres

Hyde Park is not a corner of heaven. But it does attract a population that is somewhat above average in social and moral outlook. It has attracted Barack Obama.

In 1948, when the real estate industry's terrible racial covenants were struck down, Hyde Parkers promptly organized and did so successfully to support open housing and sound living standards. It has been so ever since. That, plus the parks and lakeshore, attracted the presidential family and thousands of others. Hurrah for open occupancy and good living!

: Fifth Ward Alderman Leslie A. Hairston

As a long-time supporter of Barack Obama, I share the excitement experienced by millions over the historical significance of this 2008 election. It is an important moment in history for African Americans, the Sch ward, Hyde Park, Chicago, the U.S., and the rest of the world.

I am reminded of the steps Obama took before he was elected chis year's President-Elect. Obama was a former Sch ward resident during his campaign for both the Illinois Seate Senate and the U.S. Senate.

I have had the great fortune of being able to witness his historical transition from these positions into the presidency.

Hyde Park is illuminated by this historic moment

just as former Hyde Park residents Harold Washington and Carol Moseley Braun were respectively elected

as the first African American Mayor of Chicago and the first African American female to the U.S. Senate. Though Hyde Park will be more regularly highlighted in the newspapers, the true importance of chis election is Obama's promise co focus on stimulating the economy and improving health care.

This election, I hope, marks a new beginning of voter participation. This election shows chat voter involvement can make change happen. As the 5th ward Alderman, I would like to see a large voter turnout during city-wide elections as constituents are the political change makers of society.

--. Abner J. Mikva, former Illinois representative, U.S. Congressman, Chief Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and White House Counsel, 1994-95

To those of us who were not born in Chicago, Hyde Park is not a place as much as it is a state of mind. When you choose Hyde Park to live and plant your flag, you expect a certain kind of mores and community standards. (You better expect them; they are going co shape the way you live.) For example,

you assume that you will pal around with all kinds of people, many marching co different drummers. They may or may not influence your drumbeat, but they

are treated as part of the community. While many live well and are financially secure, that is not used as a measuring stick in Hyde Park. Community organizers and working stiffs are given the same platform for their ideas and contributions as the financial titans who choose co live here.

Politics is a body sport in Hyde Park. People know their state senators and their aldermen and constantly review their work product. They too can march to

a lot of different drummers, but their music had better be heard or else. Schools, parks and the kind of

materials used to protect the shoreline from the lake are everybody's concern and few decisions are accepted from on high without some kind of protest.

The place where the Obama family is planning to take a sabbatical is altogether different from Hyde Park. But it is much less likely to have the community glue for anybody moving into town, even as the first family.

•/" Toni Preckwinkle has served as 4th Ward Alderman since 1991.

Barack Obama came into my office in 1992 to talk about voter registration. As a staffer of Project

Vote, he was responsible for the south side and south suburbs and talked with many elected officials about working together.

I found him to be a smart and talented young man, focused and dedicated. The work he was' doing was not well received by all elected officials however. Not

everyone in office wants the voter pool increased. After all, new voters are by definition unpredictable in their loyalties.

We were enthusiastic about the effort. Ivory Mitchell (chair of our ward organization), and Marc Lipinski (precinct coordinator) worked closely with him to establish contacts and mobilize new voters.

The Fourth Ward Democratic Organization supported Barack when he first ran for the State enate in 1996 and subsequent races for Congress (2000) and

U.S. Senate (2004) and President (2008).

In his Senate race in 2004, Al Kindle (my chief of staff) took a leave of absence to work for Barack. The ward organization collected half of Obama's 25,000 petition signatures. Kindle went on to coordinate the campaign in the African American communities on the south and west sides and the south and west suburbs.

I'm proud both of the early support we gave him and his tremendous accomplishments over the last 12 years. [ffill]

Seeing History in Oak Woods Cemetery

Approximately twenty-five Society members spent a splendid October afternoon visiting the Oak Woods Cemetery, the most significant historic cemetery on Chicago's South Side. It was founded in 1854, a full five years before Rosehill and Calvary Cemeteries on

Chicago's North Side. The Cemetery was constructed at 67th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on sand ridges topped by mature oaks. Four small lakes: the Lake of Reverence, Symphony Lake, the Lake of Memories,

and Peaceful Lake accent the airy expanse of lawn and trees. The Cemetery, along with the Village of Hyde Park, became part the City of Chicago in 1889. The early cemetery, was served by horse-drawn carriages and streetcars. Starting in the 1860s, the Illinois Central Railroad provided regular stops at the cemetery.

Members were particularly moved by the graves of Mayor Harold Washington, Olympian Jesse Owens, physicist Enrico Fermi, Bishop Louis Henry Ford, and the memorial of activist Ida B. Wells. The Confederate Mound, which contains the remains of 6000 Confederate prisoners of war who died of cholera and typhoid fever at Camp Douglas on Chicago's south side, attracted much interest. Members gave special attention to the recently restored monument of the family of Hyde Park's founding father, Paul Cornell.

In addition co open-air plots, members visited the Mausoleum, which contains numerous alcoves,

chapels, and works of art appropriate to the moment. The tour was led by Warren Chilton, Community Services Counselor of the cemetery. He was a gracious,

knowledgeable host who invited people to return to see the many other attractions of this important part of Chicago's south side. CTilll

Cornell monument

\V,nlcr 2008/2009

Chicago's Finest Transportation:

The Illinois Central Electric

Fifth part of a series about the history of the Illinois Central Railroad's Electric Commuter Service.

By John G. Allen and Roy G. Benedict

DEPRESSION AND WAR

The stock market crash of late 1929 hit Chicago and the nation hard. The IC provided direct service to the Century of Progress Exhibition, held in 1933 and 1934. Although the fair cushioned the blow of the

Depression on IC Electric ridership somewhat, by 1935 ridership had sagged to 22 million (a drop of almost 14 million since 1929). Despite this, the IC bravely tried to maximize its commuter business, on an initiative modestly started by a note from IC president L.A. Downs to one of his lieutenants: "See what can be done about improving our suburban service."

This brief missive, scrawled on a piece of scratch paper, brought about a flurry of changes. Car interiors were repainted, stations were spruced up, and new signs,

in large black letters on a yellow background, clearly showed the street number of each exit stairway in huge numerals. Ticket prices were reduced; now Hyde Parkers could travel downtown for 10¢, ride round trip for 18¢, or ride round trip outside the rush hours for 17¢ (pennies counted during the Depression). The railroad introduced a $1.00 weekly commutation ticket (so known because of its "commured" or reduced price) for the benefit of regular riders short on cash and unable to scrape together the price of a whole month's transportation at a time (most people worked on Saturday mornings, so this was cheaper than six round trips). For a while, the IC sold tickets that included coupons good on Chicago Motor Coach for onward travel downtown.

World War II placed unprecedented demand on the nation's productive resources, and the IC Electric rose to the challenge. Thanks in large part to the foresight of Charles Mattier and other IC managers who planned the railroad's electrification and the various improvements associated therewith, the IC's

electrified service moved record crowds during the war, culminating with 47 million passenger trips in 1946.

POSTWARCHANGES

The IC's commuter trains did not share in the automobile-dominated prosperity of the postwar decades, forcing the railroad to raise fares, retrench its service, and seek other economies. Although ridership rose at stations in the south suburbs as developers

turned cornfields into subdivisions, an even greater fall in urban ridership more than offset these gains.

By the mid-1960s, the IC's cars were among the oldest in operation in Chicagoland. Although the railroad maintained their mechanical gear in good condition, as a precaution the IC started to run trains in minimum consists of four cars, rather than two. That way, if one of the motor cars in a train broke down, there would always be at least one other motor car

to power the train to its destination. Also, passenger amenities began to fray: many of the rattan seats began to split at the edges, and it sometimes required

Herculean strength ro open one of the windows. Riders understandably began to complain about the aging cars, although things never reached the point that they did on several Northeastern railroads where mechanical unreliability of the rolling srock started to drag down schedule adherence.

Umil the 1960s, the IC's normal fare collection procedure was a cumbersome blend of rapid-transit- style fare collection, which is based on collecting fares as passengers enter stations, and the railroad tradition of checking tickets aboard trains. Each station entrance was staffed by two women-and Hyde Parkers could enter IC stations at 47th, 51st, 53rd, 55th, 56th, 57th, 59th, and 60th Streets. If you did not already have a ticket, you first bought one at the ticket window. You presented your ticket to the gatewoman, who punched it with a conductor's ticket punch. After your·inbound

train left 53rd St., the conductor, flagman, and collectors (there was one man for every two cars of the train) walked through the train, collecting the tickets, tearing off one coupon of a round trip, or cutting off a "square" of a

ten-ride ticket with a separate punch. You then left the station downtown with no further ado upon arrival.

On your ride home, the gate attendants let you through with your green-colored Hyde Park ticket (after punching it), and you boarded your southbound express. Even if you just missed one train, there was never a long wait before the next one. In the decades before the railroad installed a public address system on its trains, the leather-lunged trainmen called our all the stations, but did not check any tickets until 67th St., from which point they made sure that everyone had a higher-priced, red-colored ticket for longer rides. In addition to these duties, on-board train personnel also collected fares from those few riders who got on at stations that did not have a ticket agent.1

AUTOMATIC FARECOLLECTION

In 1963 and 1964, the railroad, sensing the promise of automation and feeling the need to reduce the costs of an increasingly unprofitable commuter service, decided to convert to automatic fare collection, starting with the downtown stations at Randolph St. and Van Buren St. The benefit to the railroad was increased

2 o o s / 2 o o 9

productivity. Electronic fare gates would replace the gatewomen, and vending machines would replace

the ticket agents at all but a handful of stations. New public address systems aboard trains allowed train crews to announce stations without straining their voices.

As with many companies initiating new technologies, the public launching of the fare gates and the magnetically-coded tickets did not start smoothly. IC riders suffered a spectacular failure of the fare gates to function properly during their first evening rush hour

A six-car train of the Highliners in their original orange andblack paint scheme, taken from the same spot south of Roosevelt Road as the picture on

p. 4 of the Spring 2008 issue. In the late 1970s, the Regional Transportation Authority adopted a similar orange and brown paint scheme, which Metra continued until it began rebuilding the Highliners starting in the mid 1990s.

on July 1, 1965, when thousands of commuters were unable to get through the gates to their trains (which left Randolph and Van Buren on time but empty).

Chastened by this malfunction and the ensuing public relations fiasco, the railroad moved slowly ro extend the fare gates to outlying stations, a process that was not completed for another couple of years, by which time the technology was working much more reliably. The IC did not bother installing fare gates at its least

patronized stations (18th, 47th, 63rd, and 67th Streets).

Hitherto, the gate attendants only checked tickets as passengers entered the system. Uoder the new setup, the automated fare gates checked passengers' tickets for time and station validity upon exiting as well as entering. The railroad installed call-for-aid telephones adjacent to the gates for the benefit of passengers

experiencing problems with the machinery - a welcome measure as the railroad ironed out the initial problems with automated fare collection.

Another factor leading the IC to adopt automatic fare collection was that the railroad wanted to operate its commuter trains with just an engineer and a conductor once the fare gates had taken over the inspection of most

inspection of tickets, on the assumption that passengers would need valid tickets in order to pass through the gates. In the late 1960s, the railroad was willing to offer generous early retirement packages as part of a strategy for reducing crew size. The conductors' union, however,

insisted on job protection, so the issue went to arbitration. The arbitrator ruled that short trains

( two and four cars) needed only a two-person crew, and that longer trains (eight and ten cars) should continue to have three crew members, but there was no mling on six-car trains. When the railroad scheduled six-car trains to mn with only two employees, the unions went out on strike in April 1969. The strike, which also involved crew sizes on freight trains, was settled within a week, on terms advantageous to labor. 2

Incidentally, the two-part fare gates that the IC used did not help the railroad establish a customer-friendly image. These gates opened in front of and closed behind passengers with a sharp motion, and left riders with a momentary feeling of being trapped between the front and rear elements. The abruptness with which the

waist-level gates closed behind passengers left many with the sensation of being nipped from behind by an unfriendly dog.

HIGHLINERS AND TURNSTILES

The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (today part of Burlington Northern Santa Fe) brought the concept of the bilevel gallery car to Chicago's commuters with

its diesel-hauled trains in 1950. The Chicago & North Western adopted the concept starting in the late 1950s, and added the innovation-soon adopted by Chicago's other diesel commuter railroads--of push pull operation. By the mid-1960s, bilevel gallery cars had spread to all of Chicago's major commuter railroads except the IC and the South Shore Line. Following years of discussion, in 1971-72 the IC took delivery of

130 Highliners, then and now the world's only fleet of bilevel gallery cars that were also electrically-powered multiple units. The Highliners also had the distinction of being the last railroad passenger cars built by the St. Louis Car Company before it went out of business. The Highliners, named by teenage railfan Arthur Peterson in a public contest, are still in service as of 2006.

The Highliners were a quantum leap forward for riders, with air conditioning and deep-cushioned, plastic

covered seats. With rising standards of comfort among its customers, the railroad made little provision for standees, opting instead to maximize the number of seats. The

low ceilings above the seats on the lower deck took some getting used to. Many riders learned to maneuver carefully when exiting seats after having bumped their

of the tickets. Except for passengers boarding at stations

without fare gates, the railroad gave up the routine

heads a few times. Like the cars they replaced, the

Highliners featured the unusual combination of rapid ►G,

W,nler 2008/2009

.,:c;) transit-style automatic couplers and heavy railroad diaphragms to protect riders from the elements when passing from one car to another.

In 1972, the Illinois Central merged with the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio to become the Illinois Central Gulf, although IC Electric riders noticed few changes from the merger other than the new ICG name on their tickets and timetables (which never caught on fully with the traveling public). Perhaps the most noticeable change of the early 1970s was with the automatic fare collection hardware. By 1974, the railroad had replaced the original two-part gates with turnstiles which used a tripod arm, similar to those that the Chicago Transit Authority was using. Not only were the turnstiles much more user-friendly than the two-part gates, they also increased passenger throughput. This was not because they processed tickets any faster (the original fare gates also checked tickets almost instantaneously), but because passengers now passed through a single set of turnstile arms rather than through two sets of jaw like gates. Indeed, some veteran commuters learned to insert and remove their tickets rapidly enough to pass

through the turnstiles without breaking their stride-a

maneuver that was not possible with the slower and clumsier fare gates that the turnstiles replaced.

The passage of state legislation creating the Regional Transportation Authority in December 1973, followed by the passage of the RTA question in a March

1974 referendum, ensured a more scable future for all of Chicago's commuter rail operations. The RTA

negotiated a purchase-of-service contract with ICG in 1976, to take effect January 1, 1977. The standardized RTA fares implemented in 1977 were higher than those that the railroad had charged, with the unintended result chat many of the IC's urban riders - including some in Hyde Park - switched to the Chicago Transit Authority's bus and 'L' services.

On the positive side, the RTA arranged funding to replace the remaining green cars from the 1920s. An additional 36 Highliners, delivered in 1978 and

1979 from the Canadian industrial firm Bombardier, brought the total to 165 cars. One of the original 130 Highliners was destroyed in the worst collision in the railroad's history,

on the morning of October 30, 1972. {A train} made up of four High!iners was hit in the rear by {another train} made 1tp of six 1926 cars. {. .. }The Highliners were on an inbound Sottth Chicago run which had gone by the 27th Street platform when the collision occ11rred.3

One immediately visible result of this accident was the addition of large amounts of orange to the ends of all IC Electric cars, old and new. (The Highliners' ends were previously painted all black.) The railroad immediately tightened up its procedures for backing up, thus

preventing a recurrence of any similar incidents.

The delivery of the additional cars allowed the last of the original fleet to be retired in 1978. Most of them were scrapped, and the salvage value was applied to the purchase cost of the Highliners (under the funding arrangements in place at the time, the federal government paid for two-thirds of the cost of the new

cars, and the railroad was responsible for the other third).

Although the IC had earlier corrected most of the malfunctions in the automatic fare collection system, some potential revenue was going uncollected because nor all passengers boarding and alighting at non-gate

equipped stations were being checked, and a few dishonest passengers were simply jumping the turnstiles or evading the fare gates altogether by entering and exiting stations along the tracks (which was easier for the physically

agile to do on the branches, where the tracks ran at street level, than on the grade-separated main line). As a result, the railroad supplemented the turnstiles with on-board inspection of all tickets starting in 1981, as Chicago's other commuter railroads had always been doing. In November 2003 Metra deactivated the aging turnstiles altogether, in response to growing dissatisfaction from riders about having their tickets checked three times upon entering, on board, and again when leaving the system. Similar turnstiles, also used with magnetically encoded tickets, remain in service on the Port Authority

Transit Corporation (PATCO) rapid transit line between Philadelphia and Lindenwold, New Jersey. Imm

I Roy G. Benedict, "Shop Track", First & Fastest, Autumn 2002, p. 18.

2 John G. Allen, "From Commuter Rail to Regional Rail: Operating Practices for the 21st Century." Transportation Research Record 1571. Washington: Transportation Research Board, 1998, p. 130.

3 Alan R. Lind, Limiteds Along the Lakefront: The Illinois Central in Chicago. Park Forest, IL: Transportation History Press, 1986, p. 89.

.• ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••.••

• Award Winners Announced ••

• •

• Recipients of Paul Cornell Awards and Marian •

• and Leon Despres Preservation Awards will be •

• honored at the annual dinner on February 21, •

2009. Cornell Award winners are Joshua Cohen, •

• educator and historian, the entire Cornell family •

for the restoration of the Paul Cornell monument

• in Oak Woods Cemetery, and Sam Guard, •

• engineer, architectural historian, and educator. •

Two Despres Awards will be presented, the first

• to the Law School of the University of Chicago •

• for the rehabilitation of the Laird Bell Law School •

• Quadrangle. The second Despres Award will be • given to Lisa and Nate Eimer for the restoration of • the Frankenchal House, 4825 South Woodlawn, •

• designed by Hugh Garden and built in 1902. •

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

\V II

er 2008/2009

Dahlberg Memories

By Carol Bradford

I first met Al and Thelma Dahlberg in the late 1970s, when we were board members of the newly organized Hyde Park Historical Society. In those years before we had our own headquarters, the board met

in members' homes. I enjoyed visiting their home in the historic "Rosalie Villas" on Harper Avenue. At the time, Al was still active in his dental practice, and in his research on dentition of Native American populations. He and Thelma spent many summers in Alaska and winters in the southwest, making plaster casts of jaws for his physical

anthropology research. When we learned that we had

both grown up in South Dakota, Thelma and I became life-long friends-South Dakotans are rare in Chicago!

Thelma was our program chair for several years. I

remember one summer she organized a field trip by bus to Naper Settlement in Naperville. I took

my two young children with me and we had a great time. Thelma bad enlisted some of her friends to help prepare sack lunches for everyone on the trip. They used only foods that would have been available in the early 19th century, so we had sandwiches on home made bread, locally grown fresh fruit, home made cookies, and apple cider. Another of her special accomplishments was organizing the parade and ceremony for the opening of the Society headquarters in October 1980. Alderman Leon Despres and State Representative Barbara Flynn Currie were among the speakers. Someone took a picture of Thelma and me in our period costumes. This photo still brings back special memories.

The Dahlbergs had a farm in Lee County, east of Dixon, IL, where they spent weekends, and often invited friends to visit. Our first visit was on a late spring Saturday in the mid-80s, when our children were about 10 and 11 years old. On the way there they asked "What are we going to do there?" I told them we would have lunch, that's all I knew for sure. After lunch we walked through the woods and along the stream on the property. Al gave my husband and the children a ride in his old-fashioned grain wagon, pulled by a tractor. They got stuck in the muddy field and had to walk back to the house. It was a real

adventure for all. On the drive back to Hyde Park, the

kids asked "Can we go back next weekend?"

After retirement, the Dahlbergs moved permanently to the farm. We continued to visit them every few years.

Even after Al's death, Thelma would come back to the city for her volunteer activities with Cook County

Hospital service league, and various community groups, including the Historical Society. She often came for our annual dinners, and was sometimes a guest at our home. She had purchased tickets for the 2007 dinner, but was unable to attend due to poor health. Her recent death was a sad time for us, even as we celebrated the full life of a gracious lady.

James Comiskey

James Comiskey, long-time Hyde Parker and Board member of the Historical Society, passed away on November 26, 2008. Condolences may be sent to

his widow, Jane Comiskey, at 1415 East 54th Street, Chicago, IL 60615.

W,nler 2008/2009

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A GRAND PARTY

Top row, left to right: Cornell winner Josh Cohen, Jay Mulberry celebrates the election of President Obama, after-dinner speaker Elizabeth Brackett. Bottom row: (left) John and Alyse Cornell, (right) Despres Award-winning Eimer family with representatives of Wheeler Kerns, J & M Construction, and South Chicago Workforce.

capacity crowd of 180 Society members, relatives, and well-wishers saluted three Paul Cornell

Award winners and two Marian and Leon Despres Preservation Award winners at the annual dinner of the Hyde Park Historical Society dinner, held Saturday, February 21, at the Quadrangle Club. Members and guests had the opportunity to purchase photographs from the Nancy Hays Collection or books with a local

focus made available by the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

Master-of-Ceremonies Jay Mulberry entertained the audience with tales of Hyde Park life, spoofing the devotion of some Society members to landmarking off-beat community features such as the "tacky"

Hollywood Video building, the "rotting" St. Stephen's Church, "the oldest" scaffolding on 53rd Street, even empty lots. President Ruth Knack brought members ►8

o up-to-date about new projects, offered tributes for members who had passed away during the past twelve months, and praised Kathy Huff, whose skill in planning and organizing helped make the dinner a success. She also lauded Bruce Sagan, publisher of the Hyde Park Herald since 1953, for completing an

archive of the Herald dating back to the 1880s.

Seven descendents of Paul Cornell, who first established Hyde Park in 1853, were in attendance, five of whom had flown in from their home in Naples, Florida. This special family received a Cornell Award from Carol Bradford for the restoration of the Cornell Monument in Oak Woods Cemetery. Relatives had flown in from both coasts to see Alta Blakely bestow the second Cornell Award on Joshua Cohen. Josh,

an historian and educator, is studying for the degree of Master of Arts in Education at National-Lewis University. The third Cornell Award wa; presented by Jack Spicer to Sam Guard, an historian, engineer, and

lecturer about Chicago's built environment.

Despres Preservation Awards went to Lisa and Nate Eimer for the restoration of the Frankenthal House, a 1902 Prairie-style home designed by Hugh Garden, and to Douglas Baird, representing the University of Chicago Law School, for the rehabilitation of the Laird Bell Law School Quadrangle.

Leon Despres, 101 years old, looked fit in a bright maroon sweater and was warmly greeted by all.

Hyde Parker Elizabeth Brackett, popular WTTW TV journalist and reporter, amused the audience with her tales of bow the press corps responded to Hyde Park during the campaign and election. "They really didn't know what to expect," she said. "They soon realized they weren't in Crawford, Texas, anymore." She commented that before the election, the question was, "How did Hyde Park shape Barack Obama?"

Now, the question is, "How has Barack Obama shaped Hyde Park?" Imm

Clockwise, from top left: Jay Mulberry (left) with honored Board member Leon M. Despres; Jack Spicer with Douglas Baird of the Despres Award-winning University of Chicago Law School; Cornell Award winners John Cornell and Lauren Cornell Michell; Helen Cornell, Lauren Cornell Michell, and Adrian Michell, Cornell Award winner Sam Guard with Jack Spicer.

S1,rln!.1 2009

Paul Cornell Buys Some Land

By Frances S. Vandervoort

"Who'd he buy it from?" my husband asked brightly as we rounded the tip of Promontory Point on our morning walk. With this question, he spoiled an otherwise perfect spring day.

I was embarrassed. Even though I had been a member of the Hyde Park Historical Society for five years, more than three of them as editor of the Society's newsletter, I couldn't tell him when, or from whom, Paul Cornell had bought the land that changed the history of Chicago's south side.

I began to check around.Jean Block's important book, Hyde Park Houses, mentions little more than that Cornell had had the land surveyed in 1851 and in 1853 decided to purchase 300 acres of sand, oak ridges, and swampland. One long-time Hyde Parker speculated that Cornell had made his purchase from the Illinois Central Railroad, which had very recently begun operations along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

Yet, since Cornell had negotiated with the ICRR for the constmction of station at 53rd Street, it seemed unlikely that he should buy back land he had just deeded away.

Another knowledgeable Hyde Parker was confident that Cornell had bought the land from the federal government. Paul Cornell's obituary, which appeared in the March 4, 1904, edition of the Chicago Tribune, declared that he had "purchased the ground on which

Hyde Park is located from the government." But which government- United States or Illinois?

Lauren Michell, Paul Cornell's great-granddaughter, now living in Florida, provided the best clue. While in Chicago a few years ago, she found a publication at the Chicago Historical Society, the Sisson Breeze, stating that her great-grandfather had obtained the land from the "canal commission."

Lauren Michell didn't know what the Sisson Breeze represented, and had no idea what the canal commission was. I didn't either.

The Sisson Breeze, it turns out, was small newsletter put out by the Sisson Hotel, an upscale hotel built in 1918 at 53rd Street and Lake Michigan on the site

of Hyde Park House, the hotel built in 1859 by Paul Cornell to serve Chicagoans and visitors to the city desiring to escape downtown heat for cool lake breezes. Mary Todd Lincoln and her son, Robert Lincoln, spent time there after her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated in 1865. This lovely building was totally destroyed by flames in 1878; the Sisson Hotel was designed to carry on its tradition of casual elegance on the lakefront. The Sisson Hotel, for many

years the Hotel Sherry, is now the Hampton House.

The Sisson Hotel was elegant and exclusive. Only the wealthiest families could afford weddings there for their daughters. Some of Chicago's grandest balls were held there. There was a darker element to chis fine building, however. The 1920s saw a nation-wide resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and Chicago was not immune to

the influence of chis nefarious group. The Sisson Hotel became a center for local Klan activity.

The "canal commission," from which Cornell was described a purchasing the property, was a group of state officials, appointed by the governor, that managed the affairs of all canals in Illinois. Our state's most important canal was the Illinois and Michigan, built

Hyde Park House, 1859-1878

between 1836 and 1848 to connect Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River basin.

This canal was construaed on land ceded to the United States by Pocawacomi Indians in the First Treaty of Chicago, signed in 1816. Land for the canal was later granted by the federal government to the State of Illinois. In 1829, U.S. Congressman Daniel B. Cook (after whom Cook County is named), and U. S. Senator Jesse Thomas arranged co obtain from the federal government alternate plats of land five (some say six) miles wide on either side of the canal. This land was then put up for private sale, the proceeds of which were to finance the canal's construction.

The canal opened in 1848, thus opening the door to the west for Chicago and eastern commercial centers. This event, soon followed by the construction of railroads, was of enormous significance to the city's growth. Between 1850 and 1900 no city in the world grew so fast.

After arriving in Chicago in 1848, Paul Cornell set up a legal practice. When the Illinois Central Railroad built its tracks along the southern shore of Chicago,

he became interested in the real estate potential of the newly accessible south side of Chicago. Encouraged by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Paul Cornell purchased 300 acres from the Illinois Canal Commission, land that

became Hyde Park. Imm

S fJ r n H 2 0 0 9

The Museum of Science and Industry and Me: A 75th Anniversary Commentary

By Bert Benade

My first visit to the Museum of Science and Industry happened in 1933 when I was a six-year-old. My family had come to Chicago for a one-year furlough from India where my parents were missionaries. Our first trip to the Museum was to the coal mine, where I was petrified that we would never come out of a hole that deep. Kids then weren't exposed to so many gee-whiz things, and the idea that the walls were moving and we weren't really going down never occurred to me!

Another thing I remember was the Spi1.;it of St. Louis airplane hanging from the ceiling. My older brother had a cloth Lindbergh doll, which I was very jealous of, that he wanted to take to the Museum to show to the plane that had flown across the Atlantic.

In 1943, when we were back in Chicago, due to the war and another furlough, I spent many days at the Museum, mostly looking at all the clock escapements that were mounted on a wall near the Whispering Gallery. I couldn't believe that there were that many ways to make a spring-wound gadget keep time.

A few years later I watched the U505 submarine come across the Outer Drive to get placed behind the Museum. Later, when the 727 airplane was brought to the Museum in the same way, I was finally old enough to be in Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap and see the sign from the original crossing that someone had given them:

a large rectangle with the words, "Drive Carefully

- Submarine Crossing." A large sign was on the Outer Drive again, but this time it was a diamond shape and said, "Drive Carefully- 727 Crossing." I got one of those signs to give to Jimmy's to put up next to the first one.

Some time later the Museum put on a display of very small planes that pilots could actually fly. These planes came in and landed on the Outer Drive east of the Museum and parked behind the Columbian Basin.

One pilot had a pontoon plane that he would fly out of the lagoon and then fly in again and again. He kept

this up for a while as the waves in the water got rougher and rougher. I started to worry about the height of the waves, but the pilot wasn't concerned, until on a final take-off the tips of the pontoons went under a wave and the plane flipped on end and went under with only the tail above water. I looked around to see who could get

to the pilot, but very soon his head came to the surface and he waved that he was all right. I didn't stay around to find out how they got the plane out.

Around the same time there were three activities going on in the building that had nothing to do with

the Musemn. First there was WFMT, which used the east wing for one of its first broadcast and for its studio station.

A little later, WTTW also began to broadcast from the east wing, and the U.S. Navy used part of the west wing. Not many people know about this, which was formally called the Navy Project. Writers were hired from the University of Chicago and others to produce the manuals used by Navy personnel to repair and overhaul all the fighting stuff they had. How to fix landing craft engines, airplane engines, guns of all sizes, ships' engines, and all the other things that needed technical expertise. A couple of my friends worked on these manuals and learned a lot about the mechanisms of warfare.

My sense of the chronology of some of these remembrances is fuzzy, but the memories are clear. A few years ago, after the success of the Omnimax Theater, the Mu eum planned a new addition to the

building. They held community meetings about this new idea, aware that neighbors and many others were against the idea of further modifying this beautiful old building from the Columbian Exposition.. Our Historical Society voted to join the litigation against the new annex and named me to represent us at all

future contests about it. Len Despres brought the suit, with himself, Eleanor Petersen, and the Society as litigants. Of course, Public Radio wanted to interview both sides, so Len and I on one side and Joe Schechter of the Museum on the other talked on the air about our various reasons for and against the theater. On the way home I asked Joe how the Museum, as a place

for technology and science, could show movies about the Rolling Stones on their screen. Joe's response was: "I wish we had a hundred more like it. We made

a bundle!" So much for the economics of museum management.

Another part of the fight to stop the expansion took place at a meeting of the City Council's Committee on Planning. Again Len and I were there to testify

for the community. The Council had several years earlier agreed to allow the addition of the Omnimax Theater on condition that no further expansion would be permitted. I asked Alderman Burton Natarus, who chaired the Council Committee on Planning, how a new vote could be allowed that would overturn the earlier Council action. He walked over to me and said, "Do you think that that vote was recorded on stone?" I wish that I had had both the temerity and alertness to ask if all Council votes were as meaningless.

At some point, the Museum realized they had no

one on staff to answer all the questions the Museum is asked, so five of us volunteers were recruited to take on the job of giving answers. We were called the Think Tank, and were given pretty much carte blanche co

use any Museum and other materials to find answers. The questions were all over the map. Two that I was asked to answer were not typical. One was from a high school student asking us to send him everything we had on water because he had a paper due in three days. I wrote back asking if he needed stuff on chemistry, meteorology, differences in fresh and salt water, water effect on living things, the source of water of earth, or just what aspect of water he needed for his paper. And I suggested that he start with the library at his own school.

The other question was much more intriguing. A lady from New Jersey asked if we had anything on how the Navy psychologically tested men who were

assigned to submarine duty to make sure they wouldn't crack under the confined conditions. We had no such information, but I sent her a few catalogs of books about military subjects that were for sale cheap. Later,

I got a letter from her thanking me for the unexpected effort I had made and saying if she ever got to Chicago she wanted me co give her and her sons a tour of the Museum.

At about this time the Museum decided co get rid of its library and librarian. Many of the books were sold at auction and a few were moved co where the museum collections were stored. Many more were just dumped.

I couldn't believe that this Museum wouldn't have a library but I guess this was an economic decision.

At about the same time an idea was hatched to engage visitors with some of the Museum collection that had never been on display. Two of us volunteers were asked to look at everything in storage and pick out interesting things that could be put on a cart and wheeled out on the floor to show people. We chose things that could be handled by visitors without harm or serious wear, and the name, "a la carte" was given co this enterprise. It has been quite successful, and we have two carts with twenty or thirty things co choose from that volunteers take out and challenge people to identify.

Another fun experience came when the Museum decided that new employees should be interested in the surrounding community. I was asked to lead bus tours for them, so I had to make choices of what co see and what co say. I cook the employees to the U. of C. campus, Oak Woods Cemetery, PUSH headquarters,

Minister Farrakhan's mosque, and other places they weren't likely co get co on their own. Several employees who took different tours thanked me for making the trips so interesting.

Partly because of those tours, and partly because the Volunteer Council knew of my connections to the Hyde Park Historical Society, I was asked to give walking tours of the University of Chicago campus for volunteers. This was and is a challenge, co work out how to bring the history, personalities, buildings, sculptures, and personal anecdotes to life.

A new experience for me was when I was asked to take a small group of blind visitors from the Lighthouse for the Blind on a tour of the Museum. This took place when the Festival of Light was in full swing, so I had

a lot of choice about where to take them so they could touch and hear rather than see. It was a real challenge and I cheated a little in getting them to touch some of the more tactile ornaments on the trees while a Museum guide talked about the event. I took them to the coal mine and other places, and when they were leaving they asked me to write my name because they wanted to return and have me for their guide. Quite a compliment!

A few years ago there was the Festival of the Arts and Crafts of India at the Museum. With my background of growing up in India, I enjoyed seeing and talking to the artisans who were demonstrating their skills. One silversmith I got to know particularly well because

he spoke no English but could communicate with me in Hindi. He asked if he could buy some unique silversmith cools co take back with him to India, so I went to the Loop co Jewelry Row on Wabash Avenue and scouted out some of the dealers in jewelry and

jewelry-making supplies. A couple of days later I took him to visit them and as translator got quite a lesson ► CS,

-c@ in communications and technology. The silversmith was shocked at the prices of tools but came away with a number of things and thanked me profusely for my efforts.

Another thing I am indebted to the Museum for is learning about Julius Rosenwald, the founder

of the Museum. The Museum has a great deal of correspondence to and from him. When Rosenwald's grandson, Peter Ascoli, looked it over while writing a biography, he asked for numerous copies of those

documents. I was given the job of making those copies.

While doing so I became intrigued by the scope of Rosenwald's humanitarian interests. There were

letters to and from Booker T. Washington about the Tuskegee Institute, information about the Rosenwald Foundation (that built grade schools in the southern states for black children) and also about the Rosenwald Scholarship Fund. Because of this I did so e homework and realized how little public knowledge there is of

his philanthropy. Due to a fortuitous happening, I was able to meet Peter Ascoli. A friend of mine and I were in Oak Park where we walked into an antiques mall. While there, I ran across thirty or so stereopticon slides, all of which were of the Homan Avenue store and the Sears and Roebuck factory. Since Rosenwald had risen to be CEO of Sears and Roebuck, I called Peter to tell him about these pictures. He knew about them and

knew someone in the family who had so.me of them. He.

wanted these slides, so the next day he and I went out to Oak Park to get them. It turns out that when Sears and Roebuck starter selling stereopticon viewers, a set of these slides was included in every order.

One last experience I can chalk up to being a volunteer at the Museum is a most improbable happening. When I see visitors at the museum whom I suspect of being from the subcontinent of India. I walk up to them and ask in Hindi if they are from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh. One man I confronted turned out to be from the city I grew up in. He asked me for my name and address so that we could get together next time he was in town. A few weeks later he called me and asked if I would do him a favor. It turned

out he was giving a scholarship to a student living in International House at the U. of C. Since he wanted it to be an anonymous award he asked if I would be willing to represent him at the awards dinner. What a request! He was an engineer in Silicon Valley, but

wanted the award to go to someone who was making a civic and social impact on society. We need more like him and the young lady who won the prize.

As you can see I have a critical love of the Museum and have enjoyed my associations with it. I could recount more but this is enough. The Museum's 75 years of existence and my 75 years of involvement with

it have been a significant part of my life that I hope and expect will continue,into the.future. Imm

Society's Holiday Party a Success

Approximately 54 guests dropped by HPHS headquarters on December 14, 2008, to chat, enjoy holiday cheer, and view photographs taken by Nancy

Hays of local and national natural settings. More than

$500 was raised from the sale of these works, which will be used to support the Society's Archive.

Fran Vandervoort helps Clemens and Judy Roothaan select Carol Bradford and Rita McCarthy are full of good cheer photos from the Nancy Hays collection

s I• r n !J 2 0 0 g

Herald Archive Now Available Online

The Hyde Park Herald is pleased to announce that almost every copy of the newspaper published from 1883 until present is now available online at hpherald. com/archive. Publisher Bruce Sagan and his sons

have worked diligently to make this historical record available to people seeking information about Hyde Park. Sagan has been publisher of the Herald since 1953. He had followed the career of young Barack Obama since Obama first appeared on the scene in the 1990s, encouraging him to write articles for the paper's editorial page about a wide range of local, state, and national issues. Sagan is proud that the Herald was the only newspaper in the world to print the famous 2002 speech by Obama at a downtown rally ab@ut the high cost of waging war in Iraq.

Society member Steve Treffman praises the Archive, saying "it will vastly improve the range and efficiency of research on our community. It is another great and lasting contribution to Hyde Park made by the Sagan family.

Hyde Park Historical Society Archives Need Your Support

The Historical Society is soliciting donations from our membership and the Hyde Park Community for management of the Archives and for developing an online finding aid. Io addition, funds are needed to processing the Nancy Hays collection as well as for future additions to the Archives. So far, che Society has received over $7,000 from the Clinton Family Fund to underwrite this project, now being conducted in cooperation with the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago.

Contributions for the Archives can be made on the

web site at www.hydeparkhistory.org via PayPal under Donations. Under Donation Purpose, please state

"For the Archives." Checks made out to the Hyde Park Historical Society can be sent to: Michal Safar, Archivist, Hyde Park Historical Society, 5530 South Shore Drive, 9A, Chicago, IL 60637. Questions can be directed to Michal Safar at: msafar@americech.net.

New Society Members

The Society welcomes the following new members: Douglas G. Baird, Marcia and Kenneth Dam, and Jeff Rowell

Obituaries

Winston Kennedy, long-time Hyde Parker and former president of the HPHS Board, passed away on February 1, 2009. Mr. Kennedy's commitment to community service was legendary. His real estate business, Century 21: Kennedy, Ryan, and Monigal, was a model of fairness and expertise. He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and two daughters, and two sons.

Mildred Williams, HPHS member and resident of Montgomery Place, passed away recently at age 97. She was a former teacher and classical scholar at the Faulkner School.

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COLLECTING AND PRESERVING HYDE PARK'S HISTORY

Time for 'IJ[)U to join up or renew?

Fill out the form below and return it to:

The !:{gJe Park llislorlcal Sodelg

5529 S. Lake Park Avenue• Chicago, IL 60637

-·································································

This Newsletter is published by the Hyde Park Historical Society, a

not-for-profit organization founded In 1975 to record, preserve, and promote public interest in the history of Hyde Park. Its headquarters, located in an 1893 restored cable car station at 5529 S. Lake Park Avenue,

houses local exhibits. It is open to

Enclosed is my

new

renewal membership

the public on Saturdays and Sundays

in the Hyde Park Historical Society.

from 2 until 4pm.

Student $15

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Sponsor $50 Benefactor $100

Web site: hydeparkhistory.org

Telephone: HY3-1893

Name _ Address _ Zip _

President: Ruth Knack

Editor: Frances S. Vandervoort Membership Coordinator: Claude Weil

Designer: Nickie Sage

REMEMBERING LEN

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Leon Despres and Asher Cohen engage in conversation at the Society's annual dinner on February 21, 2009. Asher is the 4-year-old son of Joshua Cohen, one of the three Cornell Award winners.

PHS members have been invited to contribttte memories, aneldotes, and stories about Leon M. Despres, former

5th Ward Alderman and legendary citizen who passed away Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 101. Hyde Park History will publish as many of these tales as reach ottr mailbox.

They begin here.

Life Lessons from Leon

By Jacob Yanoivski

My name is Jacob Yanowski and I am a 20 year old college student in Boston. I was born in raised in Hyde

Park and had the privilege of becoming good friends with Len Despres when I was 16 years old. Leon was an exceptional person, and this piece, hopefully, shows some of the wonderful life lessons that he taught me as a young adult.

Len, Leon, Mr. Despres, the City Conscience, the only Negro in city council, the thorn in Daley's side, the maverick, the "elk", the lone fighter, the 1 to 49, the independent, the biker, the 5th ward alderman.

Leon Mathis Despres had many names and titles throughout his long life, but I am most honored to have called him my friend. I don't think I will ever ►fl

o have a friend like Leon again. I don't think there will ever be a man like Leon again. Out of

the multitudes of people that enter your life, only a handful actually have a substantial effect on you. There is no question that Leon was one of those people.

I sought out a friendship with Leon in 2005, when I was sixteen years old, because his story sparked my interest and ignited a passion for learning Chicago history. When I began spending time with Leon, interviewing him, it became very apparent that Leon was more than just history. Leon Despres was the furthest thing from history because he constantly reminded everyone around him to live in the present, the now, the moment. Many people preach that; few actually live by it ... Leon did.

When I first met him I was going through a rough patch of grass in my life. My parents, recently divorced, had put me in a time of sadder places.

But my budding friendship with a near centenarian showed me not a light at the end of the tunnel, but a light that surrounds every human on their journey

through that tunnel. The major part of Leon's political career was spent losing battle after battle to Daley, r., within the corrupt political system in Chicago. Most people would go crazy with failure after failure, but Leon decided that worrying about the past would do nothing; being concerned about the present in order to secure a better futuse was the only option. Leon taught me how to live in the moment, to be always aware

and present in one's day-to-day activities. The past is over-figure out how the future can be what you want it to be.

Now that is easier said than done. But watching, listening, and learning from Leon was the most invaluable education I have had in my 20 years of living. Hearing about Leo fighting the just fight for 20 years as Alderman has to be the most inspiring story

of what it means to stand up for what you believe in. But then, watching a 101 year old man who lost his ability to walk at 93 years of age write his memoirs, go to his law office once a week, speak all over Chicago, exercise, and try to learn how to walk again, leaves me speechless and in disbelief that such a remarkable man could actually exist. Because of Leon I know how I want to live my life.

That's what Leon did to you. Silently he made you challenge yourself in order to be the best person you could be.

At Leon's 98th birthday party, Studs Terkel announced to everyone that Len was his "North Star." Leon was our North Star, our conscience, and our constant reminder of the worthy way. His honesty

as a politician was unheard of and his demand for ethical politics always gave me hope that change is really possible through bureaucracy and not just when working against it.

And so I visited Leon as much as I could over the years. Throughout my years at high school I would drop by his apartment often to discuss history, current events, politics, and future plans with him. I went downtown to his law office with him once,

accompanied him on lectures he gave around the city, hosted a 98th birthday celebration for him, and went out to his favorite Mexican restaurant for lunches. And then every time I came home from College, I made sure that I got to see Leon, because you didn't want to miss any opportunities to visit him. The word lucky

is trivial when trying to describe the time I spent with Len.

Although deeply saddened by this devastating loss, I cannot help but smile at the fact that Leon lived a better and fuller life than most people can ever hope to live. His enthusiasm for life was more than just

admirable-it was contagious. I will miss his booming "Hello Jacob!" when answering the phone and his strong handshakes when I left his home. I will miss his wit and charm and I will miss his gentlemanly touch. With Leon's death comes the first time that I am in disbelief of someone's passing: Leon was pulsating

with energy his entire life, until the very end. It seems impossible to me that he could actually be gone.

Leon was my mentor and my good friend. Heroes are hard to come by in life, but true friends who change your life for the better a.re an even biggeuatity. l miss him alr ady, I always wi11.

(Note: This article was first published in the May 27 issue of the Hyde Park Herald. It is published here with the permission of the Editor of the Herald.)

Memories of This Brilliant, Strong, Gentle Man

By Noel Brusman

On Christmas Eve 1962, our apartment in Madison Park suffered a terrible fire. Someone on the second floor was screaming, it was 3 a.m. and our third floor apartment was filling with smoke. I called 911 (I think it was a longer number then), picked up the baby (3 month old Johnny) and, with 8-year old Jimmy, got down the three flights of stairs to the front door. My then husband, John Naisbitt, collected the two girls

(5 year old ana and 6 year old Claire) and his mother from the back bedrooms and led them down the dark, smoky rear stairs. The apartment was unlivable for many months.

The news got around Hyde Park. Christmas night Len and Marian invited all of us to a festive celebration at their home on 56th Street. They had little gifts for the children, a delicious dinner, and helped what had started as a terrible day end in their joyful company.

While we were enjoying the party, Len took a phone call (mind you, this was Christmas Day!) from a constituent complaining about a pothole. I asked him how much of a nuisance the job was, and he smiled and said, "This comes with the territory. This is what I do."

I last saw Len a month ago in a doctor's waiting room. I asked how he was and he said, "Fine, how are you?" I said, "Fine, but after all, here we both are in the doctor's office." He laughed and said it was just for a check up.

As I was exiting the narrow hallway after my brief appointment, he was about ro enter in his wheelchair for his. The nurse said, "Don't worry. He won't run over you. He has a very good driver." I said, 'Tm not worried about that. I just want to talk for a minute. I kissed him on the cheek, held his hand for a moment and said, "Goodbye, Len." I didn't know it would be forever. '

Memory of Leon

By Gary Ossewaarde

One of Leon's finest hours in his later years was his appearance at the centennial rededication of the

Blackstone Branch of the Chicago Public Library-the City's first neighborhood branch. Leon was spiffy, sharp of mind and humor, and poke with that boon1ing voice of his, as always. He was the community's doyen in a stellar program that featured the neighborhood's elected officials and other local and city notables. The program was highlighted by an illuminating talk

by the Society's former archivist, Stephen Treffman. Leon's special connection to the Library was that his father, a member of the Library Board and supporter of Mayor Carter Harrison II, participated in the original dedication inJanuary, 1904. Thus, the Despres family took a leadership role in improving Hyde Park at just about the time Hyde Park founder Paul Cornell passed away in February, 2004.

Maryal Dale Remembers Len

I just got back from a stay at Mongomery Place after hip replacement surgery and I'm not caught up yet!

But I was very surprised and touched by the number of other patients at Montgomery Place who asked if I had known Len Despres. When I said, "just about all

my life," they wanted to know more about him. Several said they admired him because he stood up to Mayor Daley!

One day, as we sat in the Rehab Room, a fellow patient made a comment and I told her my last conversation with him had been in the front hall of Vista Homes where we both lived. It was a March

day this spring, and he was all bundled up in his wheelchair, waiting for his grandson to come down.

I stopped and said, "Bet I know where you're off to!"

He smiled, and I said, "You're going over to the park to stand on the bridge and toss a wreath into the lagoon in memory of Clarence Darrow." He was very tickled that I had guessed right. If his grandson hadn't turned up we would have traded more stories about

Clarence Darrow who, of course, was also the lawyer for Loeb and Leopold. B

Blackstone Library display of "Hyde Park Rebels," Leon Despres and Sam Ackerman.

Blackstone Librarian Lala Rodgers with Len

Summer 2009

International House, Mid 1970s - Late 1980s

This is the fourth insta!Lment of a talk given by Claude Weil of the Hyde Park Historical Society on March 6, 2002. Cla11de was a resident of International Ho11se in 1955 and 1956, and Associate Director of B1tsiness Affairs from 1983 until 1996, when he retired. International Home celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2007.

Starting about 1978, one of the items on the International House agenda was the building of a residence in the House for the Director or, as it was termed then, a Master's Apartment. At first,

consideration was given to converting some sleeping room space but ultimately the decision was made to construct it on the National Rooms floor' right above the main lounge. This meant displacing residents from an area, which had a couple of kitchens and some small rooms where they could cook and entertain or hold meetings. This area was also used when there

was an overflow of new arrivals for the Fall Quarter. This happened quite regularly and cots were set up for them until they could be accommodated in the House or elsewhere. The conversion of space to other than resident use was always a contentious issue. To make up for depriving r sidents of this space, a resident kitchen and a series of small study rooms was planned in a basement area that had been used primarily for storage. The work on the apartment and the basement was completed in 1983

As the eighties started, the Board of Governors under the chairmanship of Jerald Brauer, Dean of the Divinity School, stepped up its fund-raising efforts primarily to make it possible for the House to offer more fellowships to foreign students so that the balance between

them and American students could be evened out. A matching grant of $50,000, over a five-year period, was obtained from the Borg-Warner Corporation. In its first year the grant was matched by a substantial

contribution from a Venezuelan foundation and a Board member.

In 1981, Prof. Maynard Krueger gave up his acting Directorship and was replaced by C. Lester Stermer, an alumnus, who had recently retired from the U.S. Foreign Service. The first two years of Mr. Stermer's directorship were troubled by a decline in residency even in the Autumn Quarter. The substantial drop in the number of Business School students, from 42.5%

to 36.6%, which had provided a substantial occupancy base, was a major concern. However, at the same time, the balance between American and foreign students improved.

In September 1982, I made a second appearance at the House, this time as Associate Director for Business

Affairs and Development. This occurred when the Center of Continuing Education, where I had been for nearly twenty years, was closed and turned into a dormitory for law and business school students, explaining in part the shrinkage of GSB students in

the House. In my new position, there was plenty to do since no one had performed either function for some time. Our early fund-raising efforts brought in close to

$100,000 in the first two years.

The first major event that occurred after my return was the House's fiftieth anniversary celebration. The celebration featured a gala dinner at which Illinois Senator Charles Percy was the main speaker. His relation to the Rockefeller family made him a fine choice. An additional gift was received from the Rockefeller family.

A good deal of activity was generated by and for the House in the eighties. A new Program Director, Ray Gude, revived the Festival of Nations, which had languished during most of the years since 1966. The yearbook was revived. Ethnic dinners were served in the cafeteria and quickly gained popularity. Aerobics classes, a sign of the times, were inaugurated. The current monthly newsletter, Compass, made its first appearance. The House hosted a world youth team

Chess Federation Tournament. Marcel Marceau brought in his International Mime School for two weeks. The Jan Erkert Dance Group. became ao in-house company and the Chicago Chamber Ensemble gave regular concerts.

In 1983, for the first time in ten years, the Agency for International Development funded a seminar for foreign students attending other universities. This event was held between Christmas and New Year's. The House also started offering Elderhostel programs that

I had been organizing at the Center for Continuing Education. They helped bring back to campus former

I-House residents and University alumni, many for the first time since they graduated.

In 1983, organized by a prominent member of the Board of Governors, Mary Ward Wolkonsky, the House hosted the first of three conferences with the title, U.S. and U.S.S.R: A Search for Solutions. Speakers at the first conference included Kenneth Dam, former Dean of the University's Law School and then Deputy Secretary of State, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Chairman of the National ecurity Council. The conference featured a Zakuska, or Russian smorgasbord, put together by the House's catering staff. The second conference brought Bill Kurtis of CBS-TV in Chicago as its moderator and George Schultz, former Dean of the Graduate School

of Business and then Secretary of State, as its featured speaker.

During this time, there was a reunion of U.S. Army students who had lived in the House during World War II to be trained as meteorologists. At that time,

s ll m Ill C r 0 0 9

one of them served as U.S. Ambassador to China. Their mascot, a three-legged dog who I believe was called Isobar, was also honored.

Fortunately, occupancy recovered and there was a good deal of optimism for the future. For all of the '80s, the House operated with a surplus. A three-quarter contract system was started with diminishing rates as the quarters progressed in the hope that this would

keep residents there for the entire year. As always, there was a heavy demand for space for the Fall Quarter, but as new students became familiar with the area and other available residential facilities, some moved out.

Many mainland China students, who were coming to the university in increasing numbers and had limited financial resources, usually stayed in the House at first but had a hard time adjusting to the cafeteria food even though we tried to provide them with tl;teir particular style of cooked rice. They would move in groups of three or four into less expensive apartments. Some residents moved out when they graduated at the end

of the Autumn Quarter, got married, or their families arrived from abroad. The food service fee remained highly unpopular though the cafeteria couldn't operate without it since it was needed to cover its overhead costs. It accomplished its purpose in making food service a break-even proposition.

The surpluses of the eighties made possible a substantial upgrading of the facilities. A major project was replacement of all the windows and making a start on replacing various roofs. Carpet runners were installed on the resident floors to provide a measure of sound proofing since excessive noise had always been a

major resident complaint. early all the common areas were improved with new carpeting and re-upholstered furniture. Bathrooms were upgraded. The House's pianos were rebuilt. The courtyard and much of the exterior were newly landscaped. Courtyard furniture was bought and for the first time in many years a new awning was installed to cover the terrace outside the Tiffin Room. The Tiffin Room itself was remodeled with a generous donation from a former resident who had worked there. Several new offices were created and old ones remodeled and new furniture was bought.

The gift shop had a major facelift. A start was made on computerizing the reservation and other business systems.

One other major project was undertaken in the eighties. Tom Coulter had been a resident of the House in its first years and had met his wife there. For many years, in the seventies and eighties, he served

on its Board of Governors. He had been the Director of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and Industry and was active in the Japanese-American Society of Chicago. The Board of Governors wished to honor Mr. Coulter for his long-time association with the House and decided to refurbish the East Lounge and name it

for him and his wife. Over a period of a year or two, several Board members contacted major Japanese corporations, former Japanese residents and other friends of the Coulters and with their contributions the Coulter Lounge was made into an elegant and beautiful room with a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Coulter over the mantelpiece. A popular fund-raising effort for the House was the creation of a Coulter Couples group made up of those former residents who had met and gotten married out of the House.

A new telephone system installed in each room substantially reduced the cost of telephone calls. A further improvement was the expansion of resident computer facilities, initially installed and maintained by the Graduate School of Business. Eventually two areas in the basement were developed for computers: one for Macs and the other for PCs. In 1989, the House was wired for cable TV. This was a major undertaking since it involved drilling through many inches of

cement and generated clouds of dust throughout the building. Imm

The final installment of Claude Weill's report about International House will appear in a subsequent edition of Hyde Park History.

,L\nother Story about the Museum of Science and Industry

What follows is William Hickman's response to Bert Benade's article about his experiences with the Museum of Science and Industry.

Well, that one catches me (Hickman writes). I thought I knew all the places connected with the 1893 Worlds Fair. Thank you. After thinking about it, I did recall a building at the north end of part of the lagoon where rowboats were rented during the 30s.

Recollections bring up some interesting and funny remembrances. Io the 30s when they were working on the inside of the Rosenwald Museum to update it

for the Science museum, us brats (yes, BRATS) would climb out on to the ledge that goes all around the museum and, with our arms stretched out and leaning heavily on the wall, we would shuffle along the ledge eight feet above the ground until someone came out and chased us off.

I recall opening day at the museum. I don't believe the general public was allowed in on that day but I did go in shortly after. I still recall the Hoover Dam

exhibit in a unit similar in size to a pinball machine, an underwater welding exhibit, the "(coal)mine", which was fabulous and the key to the whole place and a physics exhibit in the mid-rotunda area. I have been back many times, including after coming back from WW2. I haven't been there since moving away in '53, however. omeday I would like to get back there and see how it has changed.

Bill Hickman

Douglass Commemorative

Barry Rapoport, Society member, speaks at the installation of the commemorative marker for Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and minister-in-charge of the Haitian Pavilion in Jackson Park. The marker, a bronze plaque on a granite boulder, is just south of the Bowling Green where Douglass spoke in celebration of Haitian Independence Day in 1893. Other speakers included 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston; Father Carl Markelz, Principal

of Mt. Carmel High School; Jean Martin representing the Haitian and Jamaican communities of Chicago; Dr. Monica Vela of

the University of Chicago Department of Medicine; Frances Vandervoort of the Jackson Park Advisory Council and Hyde Park Historical Society; William Tillis, Jackson Park Supervisor; and Professor Christopher Robert Reed of Roosevelt University, author of All the World is Here, about the role of African Americans in the Columbian Exposition. Violinist John Tredon played the Haitian national anthem and his own arrangement of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah.

Plaque honoring Frederick Douglass

s u m mer 2009

On Saturday, April 25, naturalist and writer Joel Greenberg spoke to approximately 40 people about the natural history of the Chicago area. Afterward, he signed copies of his books, The Natural History of the Chicago Region, and Of Prairie,

Woods, and Water, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Michael Reese Hospital Buildings Threatened with Demolition

HPHS members are encouraged to review material about the Walter Gropius contribution to the Michael Reese Hospital complex at the Chicago Coalition website (http://www.savemrh.com)

Thanks to Contributors

The Society wishes to acknowledge gifts given in memory of long-time member Winston Kennedy, who passed away on February 1, 2009 from C.R. and B.J. Dockum, Nancy Harlan, Robert Ramsey, and Trieneke Schouten. In addition, Judy Allen made a generous contribution to the general purpose fund.

Seeking Information About the Rowells

Due to a technical error, the Rowell family's address and telephone number was inadvertently deleted

from HPHS's mailing list. Please contact either Frances Vandervoort, newsletter editor (vandersand@ sbcglobal.net) or Claude Weil, membership coordinator (cmweil@aol.com) to replace your name in the list.

Correction

Credit for the photo of Bert Benade in the Spring issue of Hyde Park History goes to Peter Vandervoort. The editor apologizes for the oversight.

Obituaries

Hyde Park lost another memorable figure in May. Sam Ackerman, long time political activist, passed away on May 1 at age 74.

Cedric Chernick, born in Manchester, England, in 1931, died April 2, 2009, in Hyde Park. Cedric was a gifted chemist who worked mainly at Argonne Nation al Laboratory, a position that led eventually to appoint ment as Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the University of Chicago. In this role, he headed negotia tions between the University, Argonne, and the U.S. Dept. of Energy. Cedric negotiated with the Egyptian government to arrange the 1977 loan of the Tutankha mun Exhibit to the Field Museum. He played a major role in setting up the volunteer program and database at Museum of Science and Industry. Hobbies included sailing (he was Commodore of Jackson Park Yacht Club early in this decade) and cooking. He also was an active member of the Rodfei Zedek Congregation. (Information provided by Gaty Ossewaarde and Sue Purrington)

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Hyde Park History

Joan Levin awaits an important telephone call. Muriel Rogers tells of her experiences at Kozminski School.

I’m 21 Now – reflections on Life in Hyde Park

lease call me,” implored Joan Levin. “I’m 21 now.

So ended a delightful celebration of Hyde Park memories organized by Blackstone librarian Lala Rodgers and supported by the Hyde Park Historical Society. More than 70 history buffs crowded into the Library’s auditorium on Saturday, August 1, to share reminiscences, tributes, and reflections about living in, as local historian and educator Timuel Black described it, the only community in the country that could produce the first African-American woman senator, Carol Moseley Braun, and the first African-American President, Barack Obama.

Moderators Lala Rodgers and Timuel Black offered their own reminiscences of life in Hyde Park. Tim, born on December 7, 1918, moved with his family from Alabama to Chicago in 1919, just in time for the race riots that shook Chicago to the core. Lala spoke fondly of her life on Chicago’s south side.

State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie came to Hyde Park in 1947 as a young girl. She graduated from St. Thomas the Apostle’s High School in 1954, and was proud to regard the Blackstone Library as HER

library! Judy Roothaan came to University of Chicago in 1947 to study race relations. At that time, the Rosenwald Mansion at 49th St. and Ellis Avenue ➤ 2

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1 was the headquarters of the American Council on Race Relations and the National Opinion Research Center. Arlene Rubin, who has lived in Hyde Park since the early 1960s, praised the exhibit now at the Spertus Museum about Julius Rosenwald’s efforts to support education for African-Americans in the South.

Louis Sopkin, who will turn 84 in October, recalled two tarpaper shacks on the lakefront where a few individualists survived by fishing and keeping warm in winter with small coal-fired stoves. In the late 1930s, Sopkin attended Kenwood Grammar School (now

5400 block of South Greenwood Avenue, described his and his wife’s pre-nuptial dinner at Morton’s Restaurant in 1964. He showed the audience a souvenir cocktail glass from the restaurant, and described a souvenir ashtray from the restaurant he gave to a relative who had especially enjoyed dining there. Joe spoke of a glass cover from an electric light fixture in a Green Hornet streetcar that served Cottage Grove Avenue until the mid-1950s. Joe purchased this item from a specialty shop on Navy Pier.

Bert Benade entranced the audience with a tale of his successful effort in the early 1950s to defuse a serious racial problem that had developed in the

garden fair Celebration July 18

Rita Allen

Garden aficionados and their friends attended a fine program about flowers and those who grow them

at a well-attended program celebrating the golden anniversary of the Hyde Park Garden Fair on Saturday, July 18, at the Society’s Headquarters. Bert Benade introduced Bam Postell, long-time stalwart of the Garden Fair committee, who reflected upon the many

the Illinois River near Beardstown. Panther Creek is a feeder stream of the Sangamon River.

Mr. Hendrickson commented that Lincoln used to travel the Sangamon River on a flatboat. Around 1831, he got hung up on one of the sandbars of the river near New Salem. He decided to settle down in this small town. New Salem is now a state historical site, with many of the original buildings available for public view.

I plan to visit both Panther Creek and the Sangamon River to collect sand from streams that played a role in the life of Lincoln. FSV

co-op building where he lived south of the Midway. Blackstone Rangers were harassing the tenants of the

others who had helped make the organization the success it is today, including Lee Botts, Helga Sinaiko,

Louis Sopkin describes his experiences at Hyde Park High School

all-white building. Bert, then the president of the board of the co-op, decided to speak with Jeff Fort, the leader of the Rangers about how to solve the problem. Fort said that he’d like for his mother and his siblings to move into a vacant apartment in the building.

Problems of harassment disappeared overnight, but white tenants were furious. A few months later, the building fell to the wrecking ball during urban renewal.

Arlene Rubin appealed to nostalgia by asking the audience to call out the names of businesses that had

Norah Erickson, Sophie Rudin, and Molly Salmon.

The Garden Fair Committee’s origin coincided with the beginning, in the late 1950s, of urban

renewal and the construction of the 55th St. Shopping Center. Although there were no garden stores in the neighborhood, Hyde Park echoed the national effort toward a “greener America.” Gardening became one of Hyde Park’s most important leisure activities.

Early members tended to be stay-at-home moms or mothers whose children had grown. Now gardeners exist all over Hyde Park, many of whom enjoy growing new kinds of plants. In addition, gardeners come to

the annual Fair from beyond Hyde Park to see what is offered for sale.

The spring Fair is the Garden Committee’s major

Campus Tour September 20

Paul Durica, PhD candidate in English and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, will lead a tour of the University’s campus on Sunday, September 20, 2009, from 2:00-3:30 pm. (Rain date Saturday, September 25, from 2:00-3:30 pm.) The tour, which will begin in the University’s Reynolds Club at 5706 South University Avenue, will focus on the history of the University from its beginning in 1891 up until the early 1920s, with a major emphasis on the Harper presidency.

Paul, who is conducting in-depth research for this tour, will give an extensive historical talk and will be prepared to answer questions along the way.

Cantor Academy), where a new kid, Felix Rosenbaum,

event, and is held in the 55th St. Shopping Center. This

year’s Fair sold about 50,000 plants gathered from 18-

had just arrived from Germany. Rosenbaum’s stirring essay, “What America Means to Me,” won first place in an Illinois competition. Sopkin described early days of integration at Hyde Park High School, where a large African-American boy, nicknamed Snowball, became his friend and protector against the anti-Semitism then afflicting the school.

Muriel Rogers, born in Hyde Park in 1926, also spoke of German-Jewish kids arriving in the

1930s. Many enrolled in Kozminski School, which she attended and where she used her familiarity with German to teach the newcomers rudiments of English, including how to find the restrooms. Later, she attended Hyde Park High School with Winston Kennedy and Harold Washington.

Leah Kadden recalled the 56th Street cablecar turn- around near where she now owns a townhouse at 56th Street and Harper Avenue. Also, she told of former Alderman Len Despres’ practice of opening his office on 55th Street one evening each week so that ward residents could come in to discuss local issues.

Joe Marlin, who lives in a 1902 row house in the

Judy Roothaan tells of her life as a student of race relations in the late 1940s

disappeared. Hesitant at first, audience members soon began a chorus of memories: Alexander’s Restaurant, Bordelon’s, Breslauers, Jesselson’s Fish, Hyde

Park Bowling Alley, Kiddy Kicks, Hobby House Restaurant, The Eagle, Enrico’s, Chances R, Model Camera, Mitzie’s Flowers, and, with a big sigh, the Hyde Park Co-op.

Back to Joan Levin, who had ended the celebration

20 nurseries in northern Illinois and Indiana.

A love for gardening in Hyde Park has deep roots.

Lincoln the Boatman

It’s no secret that your editor is an inveterate sand collector. A number of Society members have taken time from their travels to collect samples of these small- grained treasures of the Earth for my ever-growing collection. Thus, I was pleased to learn of a connection between Abraham Lincoln and sand.

In early spring, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune, by travel writer Josh Noel, about his experiences retracing the steps of Lincoln in central Illinois.

The article showed a view of Panther Creek, which Lincoln is reputed to have crossed on horseback. In searching for this site, I managed to contact an historian knowledgeable about the region, Harry Hendrickson of Rochester, IL. He informed me that Lincoln had been closely associated with the Sangamon River of central Illinois, which passes north of Springfield on its way to

New Society Members

The Historical Society welcomes the following new members: Paul Bruce, Robert Miller, and Gabriel Piemonte.

Obituary

Fred Blum, teacher, scholar, and raconteur died September 15, 2008. For 35 years, Fred was a professor of urban geography at Chicago State University, where he helped establish the teachers’ union. Fred was an early and energetic advocate for the preservation of Promontory Point. Donations (by check) in Fred’s memory may be sent to Hyde Park Historical Society/ Promontory Point Conservancy, 5529 South Lake Park Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637.

The following individuals have made contributions in Fred’s name: Gary Ossewaarde, Irene Patner, Rita Picken, Richard J. Shaker, and Francis and Lorna Strauss.

A u t u m n 2 0 0 9 A u t u m n 2 0 0 9

6 3

A Trip to The Jazz Age

Not long ago, while prowling the stacks of Regenstein Library, Neil Harris, University of Chicago Professor Emeritus of History and Art History,

came across several plainly-bound volumes of The Chicagoan, a little-known magazine from the 1920s and 1930s. His discovery led to an informative and beautifully illustrated book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, published by the University

Neil Harris tells of his discovery of The Chicagoan.

of Chicago Press in 2008. On June 14, 2009, Harris enthralled an audience of approximately 35 individuals gathered at HPHS Headquarters with a vivid presentation about his book and the Jazz Age, the years between the end of WWI in 1918 and the rise of the Great Depression in 1930.

During the 1920s, Chicago was the fourth most populous city in the world behind London, New York City, and Berlin. It was widely dismissed as a frontier city and haven for crime and dirty politics, and certainly was no place for culture and creativity. The Chicagoan, whose first issue appeared on June 14, 1926, was modeled after The New Yorker, which

had appeared a year earlier. It went far in dispelling the

Jack Cella of the Seminary Coop Book Store and Joan Staples admire Neil Harris’s new book.

and Gene Markey. Authors – humorists, poets, and other wordsmiths all contributed their talents to this celebration of the Windy City.

The magazine ceased publication in 1935 for reasons that are not entirely clear. After the 1933 Century of Progress fair, there seemed to be little purpose in its continuation, even though 20,000 readers read it every

month. The last issue was published in April, 1935.

Thanks to Neil Harris, The Chicagoan is no longer consigned to oblivion. FSV

Lala Rodgers and Stephanie Franklin enjoy the program of reminiscences

by announcing that she is now 21. She told the rest of her story. As a little girl, she often strolled with her parents on Promontory Point. One day, a man approached her and handed her a nickel. “Call me when you turn 21,” the man instructed. “So,” said Joan, “if you’re out there in the audience, I’m 21 now. Please call me.”

Other participants in this happy event included Olive Flowers, Jean Fuhrman, and Robin Kaufman. FSV

Another Museum of Science and Industry Adventure

Paul G. Bruce

The Summer issue of Hyde Park History contained an article by Bill Hickman about his early experiences at the Museum of Science and Industry. Long-time Hyde Parker Paul G. Bruce has sent us this account of his own experiences.

The recent memoir about the Museum of Science and Industry brought back memories about a similar adventure. We, too, started at the main entrance and, spread-eagled against the wall, made our way along the ledge. Our faces were to the wall as it kept you from

looking at the drop that awaited you if you fell from the ledge. Our goal was to reach the Porch of the Maidens. I still remember the feeling of success I felt as I stood close to these giant figures that dwarfed me and gazed into their faces. We left the easy way—jumping down from the porch to the grass. This was easy for a boy who was used to leaping into his backyard from the landing of the stairs between the first and second floor.

I remember once riding my bicycle down the grand staircase at the entrance. Once started, there was no turning back. One could only hang onto the handlebars for dear life and hope to avoid the spill that would surely result in a cracked skull. It was an experience I never dared to repeat.

My first trip to the Museum of Science and Industry was a school trip about 1935 or 1936. Parochial schools didn’t take many field trips so this was a

rare experience for us. The great hall presented a far different appearance than it does today. White painted walls rose to the ceiling where the rafters were still visible. Bright light streamed in from above. And the coal mine elevator dominated the whole space. The stairwells had not yet been squared off and the stairway to the basement restrooms, made of metal about four feet wide, clung to the wall as it spiraled down, leaving a huge void in the center that was a little bit scary.

The trip to the Museum from my home at 59th St. and Michigan was a long one, usually made on foot along the Midway. On a number of occasions, we made the trip on roller skates—the old-fashioned kind that could be detached from your shoes and checked at the

myth that Chicago was a cultural wasteland.

The stunning front covers of this magazine were designed by such well-known Chicago artists as A.

R. Katz (known widely as Sandor), Nat Karson,

front door of the Museum.

HPH

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The Chicago Metro History fair Comes to Hyde Park

Kathy Huff

On Saturday, May 30, five high school student projects from the Spring 2009 Chicago Metro History Fair were presented to a capacity crowd at the Society’s Headquarters. Event organizer Kathy Huff introduced Timuel Black, who spoke to the gathering about his experiences as a young African-American

growing up in Bronzeville during the Depression. He treated the audience to several of his most memorable stories, including the story of his service in the U.S. Army during World War II under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. He also recounted that, even though President Harry S. Truman had desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces, he and other black veterans returning from service were faced with the discriminatory real estate practices still prevalent in Chicago.

The program was highlighted by two groups of students who had been selected as winners of the 2009 Hyde Park Historical Society’s award for the best projects related to Hyde Park Township. These

awards were made possible by a generous donation from the Stein family and the Polk Brothers Foundation.

The winning projects are: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Columbian Exposition: Building Chicago, prepared by Greg Fleytlikh, Dean Kazamias, Joe Kosir & Tyler Pazik of Niles West High School, and

Hansberry Court Case, prepared by Breanna Stewart & Christopher Williams of Morgan Park High School.

Carefully prepared DVDs enhanced two of the projects. Other projects consisted of detailed large panel exhibits and research papers. Niles West’s winners, Greg Fleytlikh and Joe Kosir, showed their DVD about Frederick Law Olmsted and answered questions. The second DVD: Julius Rosenwald: A Philanthropist, was presented by four young women from Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, Kristina Hrvojevic, Nicole Jackowski, Camila Navartete & Daney Ramirez.

Breanna Stewart and Christopher Williams’ project about the landmark Supreme Court Case: Hansberry vs. Lee (1940), described the significance of this case in removing the discriminatory real estate practices described earlier by Timuel Black. Steven Mullooly,

their history teacher, praised his students’ achievement, especially considering that they were high school freshmen competing against much older students from the Chicago area.

King, was presented by Ciarra Benton & Michael Conner of Bronzeville Scholastic Academy. This work was awarded the Timuel Black Award for the best 2009 Chicago Metro History Fair project about African- American history. Tim Black praised this particular exhibit, indicating that he was a graduate of DuSable High School of which Bronzeville Scholastic Academy is now a part.

Hyde Park Historical Society Award winners Greg Fleytlikh and Joe Kosir from Niles West High School. Dean Kasamias and tyler Pazik, co-winners, were not able to attend.

Breanna Stewart and Christopher Williams from Morgan Park High School describe the Hansberry Court Case.

Kristin Machczynski, the lead teacher for this project, spoke enthusiastically about working with these two students, especially since it was the first time that

she, the students, and the school had embarked on a

timuel Black Award winners Michael Conner, Ciarra Benton, and teacher Kristin Machczynski from Bronzeville Scholastic Institute

timuel Black reflects upon History Fair projects.

standards were set by the pair that Ms. Machczynski plans to enter more students’ projects in the History Fair next year.

The final student project, George Pullman: The Unintentional Results of Misguided Oppression, was researched and written by a Hyde Parker, Jerome

Molasky, who attends Payton College Prep High School on Chicago’s near north side. HPHS board member, Noël Brusman, introduced the paper for Jerome, who was not able to attend the program. Exhibits and papers will be on display at the HPHS headquarters during the summer.

At the end of the program, Kathy Huff recognized the new executive director of the Chicago Metro History Education Center, Frank Valadez, who

a program that honors History Fair finalists and gives them the opportunity to present their projects to a larger audience than teachers and judges. He noted that the students’ participation in the May HPHS program would provide an added bonus to their college applications.

Leon Despres’ role with the Hyde Park Historical Society

Clyde Watkins

Len Despres was an early and committed member of our board. In fact, Len was part of the very first “convening session” of the Historical Society, which we held in the family room (or whatever it is they call it there) at St. Thomas church. A U-High and U. of

C. classmate of mine named Tom Jensen and I decided to see what sort of community interest there would

be in what we then thought of as a “Historical League of Hyde Park – Kenwood.” We made up a flyer and distributed it all over Hyde Park, and to our delight, a couple of hundred people showed up! One was

Len, who uttered his familiar refrain, “What’s past is prologue.”

When it came time to raise the funds for the renovation of our headquarters building, we were committed to broad local participation, so we issued “charter memberships” at $100 each. Len was one of the first to sign up. (Truth be told, we had to rely on some downtown foundations with Hyde Park

connections – mostly through Jean Block – to get the full $40,000 together to restore the building. Seems impossible, doesn’t it? But did you ever see it before the Society took charge of it?)

Over the years, Len played an important and visible role in moving the Society forward – under the careful scrutiny of his equally committed wife, Marian – from emceeing the annual dinner to making occasional timely phone calls on our behalf. It was fascinating working with him in the context of the Hyde Park Historical Society, because we all knew that we were in the presence of an important living piece of Hyde Park history, right in our midst. He was the ultimate

exemplar of what the community respects and treasures

– an individual of commitment, principle, high dudgeon, and no small amount of Don Quixote-ism.

Double Duo: Timuel Black and Martin Luther

project for the Chicago Metro History Fair. Such high

expressed his appreciation to the HPHS for developing

He remains a role model for us all.

HPH

A u t u m n 2 0 0 9 A u t u m n 2 0 0 9

Hyde Park History

Camp Douglas

Schematic view of Camp Douglas, looking west from Lake Michigan. Old University of Chicago, just south of the Camp, is at the left.

Mindy A. Schwartz, MD

t may be difficult to believe, but one of the largest Civil War prison camps in the United

States was right here in our backyard! Camp Douglas was located on land south of 31st Street in the area currently occupied by Michael Reese Hospital. The actual site was between 31st and 33rd Streets and

from the railroad track on the east to a block or two west of the current Martin Luther King Jr. Drive (either Forest or Calumet Avenue). Driving by today, one sees no remnants of its disturbing past, only a comfortable residential neighborhood just north of the Lake Meadows Shopping Center. The Illinois Central railroad tracks run along the eastern edge and then, as now, remain an important landmark. While few ➤ 2

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people know about Camp Douglas, far more have heard of its infamous southern counterpart: Georgia’s Andersonville Prison.

Stephen A. Douglas

The land that once housed the Camp was part of a larger property owned by Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas was born in Vermont but made his fame in Illinois where he enjoyed considerable professional success. He started out as a member of the Illinois General Assembly, became Secretary of State, was

ultimately elected to the Illinois Supreme Court and was subsequently elected to the U.S. Congress in 1843 and then to the U.S. Senate in 1847. The well-known Lincoln-Douglas debates took place all over Illinois in 1858 when he was the incumbent and a well-respected statesman. He ultimately retained his Senate seat, but the debates gave national attention to Douglas, and more importantly to Abraham Lincoln. Despite his advantages, Douglas ran unsuccessfully against Lincoln for the Presidency in 1860. His financial success allowed him to purchase property along the lakefront next to the railroad. This property also included his home, which he named Oakenwald.

Douglas donated another parcel of land to what is now known as the “Old University of Chicago,” then located between 34th and 35th streets on the west side of Cottage Grove Avenue. The cornerstone was laid in 1857, but the University eventually closed in 1886 due to financial troubles. Sadly, Stephen Douglas died in June of 1861 of typhoid fever at the age of 48 years. Shortly after his death, his properties that were

in proximity to the University became a recruiting and training facility for the Union Army. While the Camp was initially built with state funds, it soon was turned over to the federal government. No markers of the Old University of Chicago remain, but a state historical site and monument to Stephen Douglas stand at

35th Street and Lake Park Avenue on land facing the Illinois Central Railroad. A spectacular 96-foot statue of Douglas commissioned by Leonard Volk stands above his crypt, which is surrounded by elegant bronze statues.

Camp Douglas was in operation for the entirety of the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865. Because of

Chicago’s support for the war both in terms of troops and money, the city was considered to be the war capital of the west. Early on, given the superior resources and manpower of the Union over the Confederacy, few believed that the war would last more than 90 days.

Many of the most famous Civil War battles were fought in the eastern theater in the area around Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, a number of which ended in humiliating losses for the north.

The first significant Union victory took place under

Stephen A. Douglas Monument and tomb, 35th Street and Lake Park Avenue

the leadership of Brigadier General Hiram Ulysses Grant—known to posterity as Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant’s strategy was to capture the supply routes for the south by controlling the land around the Mississippi River valley. In February 1862, his victories at Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee were the first Union victories in the Civil War and harbingers of the success to follow.

Due to its proximity to the Illinois Central Railroad, prisoners from the Tennessee campaigns were sent by train to Chicago. Chicagoans were surprised that Camp Douglas was selected to hold Confederate prisoners.

The Camp had no provisions for these prisoners, and early commanders coped with challenging and difficult circumstances. The first commanders of the Camp did not even take accurate counts of the incoming combatants. Soldiers from both sides were not separated, and troops training at Camp Douglas were housed with newly captured rebel prisoners

of war! Early on, funds were mismanaged, and the frequent turnover of the commanders contributed to a high level of disorganization. The guards, who were few in number and poorly trained and supervised, proved to be a perennial weakness in the Camp.

Locals were allowed to visit the Camp and offered

Hidden History of the U. of C. Arouses Curiosity

On September 28, approximately 40 history buffs gathered outside Reynolds Club of the University of Chicago to meet the noted economist, Thorstein Veblen. No, not quite. Instead it was a poseur, Paul Durica, a 21st Century humanist dressed in the

Paul Durica leads history tour

professorial robe of one of the most learned economists of the early 20th Century. Paul welcomed enthusiasts who came to learn about the early history of the University—its secrets, its remarkable architectural forms, and some peculiar traditions of its early years, including the separation of the sexes in certain venues, a practice soon dropped by the young University.

Paul Durica, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English of the Division of Humanities of the University, stepped into the role of Professor Veblen with aplomb, guiding people through limestone passageways and wood-paneled meeting rooms, all the while entertaining listeners with anecdotes and tales of early academic life in Hyde Park.

Kathy Huff of the Hyde Park Historical Society, which sponsored and advertised the tour, pointed out that the tour is an attempt to reach out to the

community and interest younger folks in the history of Hyde Park. “Besides being good-looking,” Kathy says, “Paul Durica does a tremendous amount of research in the archives and really goes in-depth when presenting his tour.”

The success of the tour was measured by the fact that, due to popular demand, two more tours were held on subsequent weekends. More than 75 people participated in the three events. FSV

Obituary

Rita Picken, long time Hyde Park resident and Historical Society member, passed away on Tuesday, November 17, 2009, at age 90. She was a dedicated member of the Hyde Park Garden Fair Committee, worked as a volunteer for the Oriental Institite, and served the community in numerous other ways. Her grace, humor, dynamism, and many years of service will be long remembered. A memorial service is planned for Saturday, January 9, 2010 at St. Thomas the Apostle.

Correction

In the article in the Autumn, 2009, issue of Hyde Park History, “I’m 21 Now…,” State Representative Barbara Flynn Currie is described as having graduated from St. Thomas the Apostle’s High School in 1954. In fact, she graduated from St. Thomas’s Grammar School in 1954, and from the University High School in 1958.

We regret the error.

New Society Members

The society welcomes six new members to its ranks. From Hyde Park are Barbara Bowles, Sylvia Mann, Mary Morse & James McBride, and M. Sutton Yeadon. From Stamford, CT, comes Giles N. Ross.

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A Busy Three Months for the Society

During the past three months, Society members’ calendars have been filled with tours, special exhibits, and talks by experts in local history and lore. In late August, a showing of photos from the Leon and Marian Despres Family Album opened at Society Headquarters. The exhibit, compiled by Caroline Cracraft, historian and long-time friend of the Despres family, depicted family members in childhood, youth, and maturity in casual and formal poses. Len and Marian are shown in

Caroline Cracraft, Bob Despres, and 4th Ward Alderman toni Preckwinkle at opening of Despres Archive

social, political, and professional activities, including campaigning, home life, and social gatherings.

Also in August was a tour of the Ryerson and Swift homes in Kenwood. These houses, built during the last two decades of the 19th Century, have large porches, grand staircases, extensive wood paneling, and

handsome fireplaces. They are now owned and managed by the Croatian Franciscans and the Croatian Ethnic Institute.

Paul Durica, Ph.D. candidate in the Division of the Humanities, introduced Society members to the

“Hidden History” of the University of Chicago. These excursions are described in another article in this issue.

On Saturday, November 7, HPHS Board members were treated to a tour of the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library. This tour, presided over by Dan Meyer, Associate Director and Archivist of the Research Center, and Maija Anderson, Processing Archivist of the Research Center, guided Board members and invited guests

to the Library’s lowest level to see a portion of the 270,000 rare books stored there. Dan Meyer noted that “rare books” are not necessarily “old” books. They can be scarce, intrinsically valuable, part of a dedicated collection that in itself is protected.

A map on the wall denotes the location of different parts of the collections, some of which have nicknames. “Elephants,” for example, are books too large to store on regular shelves. Even larger are “whales,” which have a separate section of their own.

Items available for study in the Special Collections include a large selection of Gilbert and Sullivan costumes packed away in stacked cartons. Also,

the “Francis Bacon Collection,” which came to the University Library System in its own oak cabinet, is used for research by English scholars. Available also are photographs of all athletes of the University of Chicago dating back to the 1890s. And, of course, the Archive of the Hyde Park Historical Society has a place of its own in the Special Collections. A special exhibit of that collection was prepared for the group by Maija Anderson and included early Hyde Park Art Fair Posters, Columbian Exposition materials, a 1964 Hyde Park High School Yearbook (Aitchpe), a Ray School reunion program, and original photographs of

the Historical Society Headquarters before and after the renovation in 1980.

On Sunday, November 8, Susan O’Connor Davis spoke to a standing-room-only audience at the Society’s Headquarters about her upcoming book, written in conjunction with John Vinci, noted Chicago architect. The book is tentatively scheduled for publication by the University of Chicago Press late in 2010. It describes the 150-year social and architectural history of Hyde

Sam Guard describes ceiling of Ryerson Home

Park, and will be an appropriate sequel to Jean Block’s classic book, Hyde Park Houses, published in 1978 by the University of Chicago Press. Ms. Davis has been grateful for the multitude of suggestions, ideas, and memories provided by friends and local residents, and invites other ideas, especially about social and political aspects of life in Hyde Park. Please contact her at

HydeParkHouses@gmail.com if you have any photographs or stories of interest. FSV

both humanitarian (and even contraband) supplies, sometimes supplying prisoners with money, weapons or contraband uniforms to facilitate escape. Escape attempts were regular occurrences that sometimes succeeded. Typically, prisoners who attained

their freedom did so with the help of Confederate sympathizers in Chicago.

According to official records, it has been estimated that more than 26,000 soldiers were interned at the Camp between 1862 and 1865. Early in the war, both sides participated in prisoner exchanges, which periodically decompressed the prisons. As time went

on, the exchange policy was discontinued. Confederate captives could be released if they took an “oath of allegiance” and promised to become “loyal and true citizens of the Union.” Few took this option as their fellow Confederate soldiers would either shun or at times physically abuse the would-be defectors. Of

far greater consequence was the fact that the soldiers planning to defect could be executed if found in Union uniform on Confederate soil.

The facilities at the Camp were substandard in modern terms but comparable to the nearly

100 other facilities that held Civil War prisoners nationwide. Prisoners’ rations were meager and hunger was common. Vegetables were scarce and meat was frequently substandard, prompting a formal investigation of the suppliers. At one time, prisoners were forced to eat rats and even dogs! The inmates often lacked appropriately warm clothes and many suffered exposure from harsh Chicago winters. They slept three to a bed without bedding; overcrowding even led some to wind up in tents.

The high death rate in the Camp was largely due to disease related to the unsanitary conditions.

Primitive hygiene led to a high mortality rate from dysentery, cholera, and typhoid fever. Infectious diseases were prevalent: pneumonia, measles, small pox and even scurvy were common and potentially preventable. Hospital and medical facilities were woefully inadequate. A converted stable located outside the camp and just west of the University became a dedicated smallpox hospital. A formal report by the U.S. Sanitary Commission in the summer of 1862 found “standing water, foul sinks, unventilated and crowded barracks, soil reeking with miasmatic accretions, rotten bones enough to drive a sanitarian to despair.” Although the conditions were widely known,

Montgomery Meigs, the Quartermaster of the War said that, “10,000 men should be able to keep the Camp clear and the United States has other uses for its money than to build a water works.” The need for a sewer system fell on deaf ears. Some even recommended closing the Camp all together. Running water and toilets would not become available until 1863.

Prison discipline was harsh and men were punished

for minor infractions. Detainees were subjected to sit in the snow. Some were forced to drag a 30 lb cannon ball around their ankle or made to sit on top of an unfinished wooden saw horse for hours with weights fastened to their legs. Others were literally strung up by their thumbs. The Camp had its own infamous prison known as “White Oak Dungeon” -- a prison within a prison. In 1864, rations to Camp Douglas prisoners were deliberately cut in retaliation for abuses at other prisons. Guards contributed to making life in Camp Douglas hard, brutal and depressing.

the Camp Douglas Conspiracy

In the 1860’s, Illinois was a growing center of trade. The population had tripled between 1860 and 1870, growing from nearly 110,000 to just less than 300,000 people. The growing population was home to a significant number of Confederate sympathizers,

known as “Copperheads,” as well as a significant group of “Peace Democrats” opposed to Lincoln and “his war”.

In 1864, a plot was hatched to liberate Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas along with those held in prisons at Rock Island, Alton and Springfield. It was feared that these troops would sack and burn the city. The conspiracy never materialized, but it was ➤ 4

Confederate Mound in Oak Woods Cemetery

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decided to reschedule the 1864 Democratic National Convention, slated to be held in Chicago on July 4th, to August 29th. For a time, martial law was declared in the city. Those held responsible were tried in a military court in Cincinnati. Several were convicted, including one who was sentenced to death. Those found to be culpable included Buckner

S. Morris, a judge and former Chicago mayor. Colonel Sweet, the military commander at Camp Douglas

at the time was awarded a commission as Brigadier General for his role in uncovering the plot and preventing potential urban tragedy.

the Confederate Mound in Oak Woods Cemetery

After the war, Camp Douglas was closed and completely dismantled by November 1865. Like many other aspects of Camp life, the fate of the Confederate

Historical Marker for Camp Douglas on south Martin Luther King Drive

dead remains questionable. Some bodies were thought to have been sold to local medical schools. Initially the bodies of rebel soldiers were interred at Potter’s Field

- a part of City Cemetery (later part of Lincoln Park). Shifting geographic and political conditions resulted in a move to the current location in Oak Woods Cemetery just south of Hyde Park at 67th Street and Woodlawn Avenue. In April 1867, coffins from Confederate prisoners were relocated to their current resting place in the Confederate Mound of the Cemetery. A pile of

cannon balls and a monument listing almost 5000 names are all that remain of the Confederate soldiers who died in the Camp. The monument, largely privately funded, was dedicated on May 30th, 1895, by President Grover Cleveland. While the exact number buried there remains uncertain it is considered to be the largest Confederate burial site outside of the south.

Legacy

The Civil War was a defining moment in the history of the United States of America. Sadly, few Chicagoans remember the heartbreak and horror of Camp Douglas, a supremely inhumane place. It has been observed

that history is written through the eyes of the victors, which is certainly true in this case. The comparable prison in Georgia known as Andersonville was only open from 1864 until 1865. Conditions there were even more intolerable than those in Chicago with no shelter or sanitation facilities whatsoever. In 1865, the Confederate commander of Andersonville, Henry Wirz, was found guilty of willfully and maliciously injuring the health and destroying the lives of soldiers

held behind Confederate lines. He was court-martialed, tried, and executed for his role in the mistreatment of 30,000 Union soldiers. No Union commander suffered a similar fate.

Today, Andersonville is a national historic landmark. For Camp Douglas, the plaque shown at the left is all that remains. We can honor the memory of those who perished and appreciate our extraordinary community by remembering this small piece of Chicago history.

HPH

Bibliography

1. Bollet AJ. The major infectious epidemic diseases of civil war soldiers. Infect Dis Clin North Am. 2004 Jun;18(2):293,309.

2. Karamanski TJ. Rally ‘round the flag: Chicago and the civil war. Chicago : Nelson-Hall; 1993.

3. Levy G. To die in chicago : Confederate prisoners at camp douglas

, 1862-1865. Evanston Ill: Evanston Pub.; 1994.

4. McIlvaine M, Reminiscences of chicago during the civil war. New York : Citadel Press;1967; 1914.

5. Pucci K. Camp douglas, chicago civil war prison. Arcadia Publishing; 2007.

6. Sartin JS. Infectious diseases during the civil war: The triumph of the “third army”. Clin Infect Dis. 1993; Apr;16(4):580-4.

and intercity passenger tracks.2 In contrast to some of Chicago’s railroads, the Illinois Central (and now

Metra Electric) controls all of the junctions affecting its operations.3

From Kensington to Richton Park, the main line is double track. The extension to University Park is single track. Metra stores main line trains overnight at two yards—one between Matteson and Richton Park, and the other at University Park.

The track arrangements for the two branches are straightforward. At 67th St., there is a junction where the South Chicago branch trains descend to ground level on a ramp and then burrow under the embankment to emerge on the east side of the Illinois Central right-of-way. The South Chicago trains continue to the end of the line (which was extended two blocks from 91st to 93rd St. in June 2001) on a two-track alignment with multiple grade crossings. There used to be a yard on the east side of the tracks just to the south of 83rd St., but it has not been used for decades.

The Blue Island branch leaves the main line around 120th St. and proceeds west on a right-of-way with many grade crossings. The branch is single-track except for a passing track at West Pullman and a two-track platform at Blue Island (where there is also a yard for storing cars).

One little-known facet of IC Electric service was the Washington Park branch, which ran from Harvey to Homewood via the Washington Park horse racing track. The branch never saw regular daily service, but there were trains on race days (both through trains

to and from Randolph Street Station and shuttles to and from Harvey). Although during its peak years the race track generated a large business for the IC, by the 1960s the branch was becoming more trouble than it was worth. The last revenue trains operated there in the early 1970s, and today there is little evidence of the branch’s junction at Harvey.

South of Kensington, the double-track suburban line switches from the heavy steel lattice towers supporting the overhead wires further north (including through Hyde Park) to smaller, lighter structures. There is a similar shift on both the South Chicago and Blue Island branches.

Opposite Soldier Field and just north of the storage tracks where much of the fleet rests between the morning and afternoon rush hours is the Weldon Shops building, constructed as part of the original

electrification and used for light maintenance. Until the early 1970s, the railroad performed heavy maintenance at Burnside Shops at 95th St., where Chicago State University stands today. When Burnside was closed, the railroad moved its electric maintenance to Woodcrest, located in Homewood along the little-used southern end of the Washington Park branch, but with the

closure of the bulk of the Washington Park branch soon after Woodcrest opened, its location was far from ideal. In the 1990s, Metra opened a new heavy maintenance shop along the west side of the main line around 122nd St., known as “KYD” (for Kensington Yard).

Today, Metra Electric’s tracks, switches, and signals are governed from a modern, remotely-located control center, but until 2009 Metra used an earlier technology whereby employees known as tower operators controlled switches electro-pneumatically from signal towers located along the side of the tracks. There used to be

an office along the west side of the Track 2 platform at Randolph Street Station where the switches at the station were controlled. Up through the late 1990s,

when Metra moved control of the terminal tracks to its operations center, riders could look through a window and see a large “model board” showing the station’s track arrangements.

The brown brick 51st St. signal tower, still standing along Lake Park Avenue between 50th St. and East Hyde Park Boulevard, formerly controlled the switches where the electric commuter main line narrowed down from six tracks to four. Also controlled from the 51st St. tower was a “pocket track” between the inner pair of tracks just south of 53rd Street. Here, Hyde Park locals, which terminated at 53rd-Hyde Park, would reverse direction for the trip back downtown.

At 67th St. stands another brick signal tower, which controlled the grade-separated junction with the double-track South Chicago branch until 2009. It was

the last remaining tower on Metra Electric to be staffed. Just south of 115th Street, the brick signal tower on the east side of the alignment controlled the switches north of Kensington and the junctions for the South Shore Line and the IC’s Blue Island branch (which is single track except for a siding at West Pullman).4 (There is another brick signal tower, no longer in use, south of the Metra Electric and Amtrak stations at Homewood.) HPH

2 Richard R. Gill, “Please Don’t Snag the Hangers.” First & Fastest, Winter 2005-2006.

3 Terry McMahon, “Interlocking Plants and Tower Operations of

the Chicago Terminal.” Green Diamond (Illinois Central Historical Society), March 1999.

4 “Kensington Tower Closes,” First & Fastest, Winter 2007.

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7 Smoking cars had long been provided on IC commuter trains; in the days of steam locomotives, smokers were free to light up in the car of the train where baggage was carried. The public timetable first mentioned smoking cars in the September 26, 1926 issue: “Smoking car is now the Head End Car, in each direction, on all Suburban Trains.” The September 25, 1927 timetable simply said “Smoking car is the Head End Car, in each direction.” Apparently the novelty of this arrangement had worn off after a year of electric service.

57th Street Metra Station, 1995

The habit of reserving the north end of the train for smokers began shortly thereafter. The December 18, 1927 timetable said “Smoking car is the North Car, in each direction.” The phraseology changed with the

November 15, 1936 timetable to “The north car of each train is set aside for those who wish to smoke.”

Smokers enjoyed additional room to puff away during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Between the April 28, 1940 and the October 30, 1960 editions, the timetable

said “Two smoking cars are provided for smokers in suburban trains of six or more cars—the two north cars are the smokers. Two and four car trains have one smoking car at the north end.” The allocation of smoking and non-smoking cars became less precise

effective with the April 30, 1961 timetable: “Smoking cars are provided for smokers in suburban trains—the north cars are for smokers as indicated by signs.”

The coming of the Highliners—which have always been entirely non-smoking—forced a change in phraseology effective with the April 20, 1972 timetable: “On other than Highliner equipment, the north cars are for smokers as indicated by signs.” But

the tide was already beginning to turn in favor of non- smokers. Reflecting changing social habits as well as a desire to keep the new cars clean, the Highliners were non-smoking from the outset.

Between January 1, 1974 and January 1, 1979,

the timetable notice read “On other than Highliner equipment, the north car is for smokers as indicated by signs.” As was the case until 1940, there was now no more than one smoking car per train of the green cars. The January 1, 1979 notice about smoking cars was already a bit out of date—the last of the old green cars were retired in 1978, leaving an all-Highliner (and hence non-smoking) fleet on the Illinois Central Electric. (In smoking, as in many other matters, the IC was ahead of its time; Metra phased out smoking cars on its other commuter rail lines in 1990, more than a decade after the IC had become a non-smoking commuter railroad.)

Physical Plant and Operations

As originally configured in the 1920s, electric service operated on three tracks between Randolph St. and 11th Place, just north of the station at Roosevelt Road (a situation which continues today). Before 1962,

when the railroad made the center track “reversible”, all outbound trains ran on Track 1, the westernmost track, adjacent to the waiting room at Van Buren Street

Station. As may be imagined, during the afternoon rush hours the combined procession of IC and South Shore Line trains ran on extremely close headways, as their counterparts on the “L” also did. Then as now, inbound trains had a choice of the other two tracks.

At 11th Place, the electric line widened to six tracks (now it widens to only four). Roosevelt Road was

the only station en route where there were platforms serving all six main tracks. The innermost platform, between the two local tracks, did not survive the reconfiguration of the main line following the removal of the two outermost tracks in 1962. One of the two former local tracks at Roosevelt Road is now gone, but the other remains in service as a “yard lead” to bring trains to and from the car storage yard at 16th St.

Although largely empty on evenings and weekends, it is full on weekdays between the morning and afternoon rush hours. The outer two platforms were for semi-fast express trains and extra-fast specials. Today’s Museum Campus-11th Place station lies partly toward the north end, and partly just north of the post-1962 Roosevelt Road station.

Just north of E. Hyde Park Blvd. (51st St.), there is a pair of switches between the local and express tracks. Until 1962, when the six tracks were reduced to four, this was the point where the outermost tracks (used by the extra-fast trains designated as specials) ended.

The main line still continues its four tracks to a set of switches between 111th St.–Pullman and Kensington– 115th St. The latter is still an important junction point for Metra Electric trains to Blue Island and South Shore Line trains to Indiana. The junction with the South Shore Line is the only element of today’s Metra Electric with a same-level crossing of the Illinois Central freight

recollections of Bob Ashenhurst

Written at the Request of Hyde Park History

by Roland Bailey

Bob Ashenhurst burst upon the Hyde Park scene in 1957 when he joined the faculty of the University’s Business School in 1957. He had been a contributing member of the Hasty Pudding theatrical club at Harvard, and almost immediately began to take an interest in the University faculty’s annual Quadrangle Club Revels. The Revels, combining local and faculty talent, had already been taking place every March in Mandel Hall for years.

I, as an amateur chorus director, had started working with the Revels a year or so earlier. My old notes show that he, working with local stockbroker Robert Pollak, contributed no fewer than five songs to The Sky’s No Limit in 1958. Songs included “The Waste Land,” a reference to the urban renewal process then underway.

We remember Harlan’s dresses, we remember Hanlin’s cokes; We remember how we shopped at Bordelon’s, with the other well-heeled folks....

Oh, Zeckendorf, oh Zeckendorf, can’t you hear us calling?...

and

We inhabit Steinway’s drugstore, we’re sophisticated as hell,

We live on art, and Jean Paul Sartre, and we think that’s living well.....

The whole show was a gas, and the audience went wild.

Bob’s sister, Nancy Lorie was talented like Bob, but as a director, stepped up to direct We’re Unique in 1959. Bob made two contributions—one a setting of Ned Rosenheim’s and Shirley Ginther’s song about our local Co-op:

Love came to me in the household supplies, Lux was the light that came true....

Walled in by lots of that product of Scott’s, I fell a pris’ner to you...

The other contribution was his own fitting together of four popular songs. Each was first sung separately, with its own introduction, as a male solo. Then, as a surprise, all four melodies, their harmonies matching, were sung simultaneously by a barbershop octet as it moved in stereophonic sound from one side of the stage to the other:

By the light (by the light) of the silvery moon....

Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you....

Come away with me, Lucille, in my merry Oldsmobile....

Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll....

The audience was enchanted.

Then in April, 1959, only one month later, there was a benefit production of Bob’s The Pied Piper, a mini- operetta, at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club.1

As if that were not enough, Bob Ashenhurst and Bob Pollak together went on to help the University’s Department of Biological Sciences celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication, in 1859, of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Working closely (we never knew which one wrote the words and which one

the music), they composed and produced, in November, 1959, a full-length musicale about the complex life

of Charles Darwin under the title Time Will Tell. Lady Huxley came from England for the performance (and helped us during long rehearsals with our British pronunciations):

Homeward plows the Beagle, after five years at sea, Straight as the flight of an eagle, in the service of Her Majesty....

We’ve assembled here at the invitation / of the august British Association;

Paragons of legislation / join in high debate....

Later, Bob and I both did a little work on the ➤ 6

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South Side Story Revels in March,1960. After that, we faced a year of musical inactivity. Sitting in my kitchen over coffee one day in May, Bob surprised me by saying, “Why don’t we produce a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.? We could do The Gondoliers—that’s a big show. You could be the musical director, and my sister Nancy could direct the production.”

Bob was a promoter. He recruited principals and chorus from the still glowing cast of the Revels and Darwin shows. His sister Nancy secured the support of Adventures in the Arts from the Laboratory Schools. The parents sewed the costumes. With the help of Siegfried Moysich, I recruited and rehearsed an orchestra. Our Ray Lubway (from the Laboratory Schools) was as good as the Savoy Theater’s Martin Green.

When in November, Ray, as the Duke of Plaza Toro, walked on the stage, peered around, sniffed, and delivered the very first lines, the reaction from the audience assured us that our show was made.

At last we have arrived at our destination As a

Castilian hidalgo of ninety-five quarterings, I regret that I am unable to pay my state visit on a horse. As a Castilian hidalgo of that description, I should have

preferred to ride through the streets of Venice. But owing, I presume, to an unusually wet season, the streets are in such a condition that equestrian exercise is impracticable. No matter. Where is our suite?

During the fifty years that followed, Bob served as treasurer of our local Gilbert and Sullivan Company for thirty-six. His sister lived long enough to direct the first six annual productions. Later on, he himself directed another six productions. His presence was felt in the Quadrangle Club Revels—and the community—during the entire fifty years. But none of those following years, in my opinion, were quite as full, or as vital, as those few years between that particular Revels production of The Sky’s No Limit, in 1958, and that first Gilbert & Sullivan production of The Gondoliers, in 1960. HPH

1(The Pied Piper was repeated in 1967 and again in 1984.)

gilbert and Sullivan in Hyde Park

Trip Driscoll

To mark Hyde Park’s Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company’s 50th Anniversary, during winter quarter the Regenstein Library will have on display an exhibit documenting the history of the company. The exhibit will include costumes, photographs, programs and models of sets from the Company’s most memorable shows.

The Company’s association with the Hyde Park community and the University of Chicago goes back its beginning in 1960. In 1962, it began a 21-year relationship with the Parents’ Association of the

University of Chicago Laboratory School. Proceeds from the shows benefited the school’s Adventures in the Arts Program. In 1983, the University’s Department of Music began sponsoring the shows with proceeds going to fund the Department’s performance programs. In 1991, the University Chamber Orchestra began playing for the performances.

Over its 50 years, the Company has performed every work in the Gilbert & Sullivan canon. The company has a policy of alternating the signature operas with the obscure, taking into consideration anniversary years and programming by other local companies. H.M.S. Pinafore, perhaps the most popular opera, has been produced seven times. The Gondoliers, The Yeomen of the Guard, Ruddigore, The Mikado, and Iolanthe have each

been produced six times; The Pirates of Penzance has been performed five times; Princess Ida and Patience three times each; Trial by Jury and The Sorcerer twice; and Cox and Box, Utopia Limited, The Grand Duke, and Ivanhoe all produced one time each.

In celebration of the Company’s 50th Anniversary a very special production of The Mikado will be performed in Mandel Hall on March 12, 13, and 14, 2010. For more information, please visit our website at: www.gilbertandsullivanoperacompany.org. HPH

Chicago’s finest Transportation: The Illinois Central Electric

Sixth part of a series about the history of the Illinois Central Railroad’s Electric Commuter Service.

John Allen

From turmoil to Stability

Nineteen eighty-two was not a good year for Chicago’s transit customers, as a financial crisis resulted in service cuts and a doubling of commuter railroad fares. As a result, more riders found other ways to get to work, either to the Chicago Transit Authority (whose fares increased by only 50%) or, in the suburbs, to quickly-organized bus charters, few of

which stood the test of time.1 Although many residents of the IC’s catchment area were unhappy about the service reductions of those years, the entire market for downtown travel was in decline from the 1950s until the revival of the Loop in the 1980s and 90s—and the automobile dominates even this transit-friendly travel market outside of rush hours.

Stability returned to the rails following the 1983 creation of Metra, which lowered fares for IC riders between Randolph St. and South Chicago in 1984, thus helping to rebuild ridership. In 1987 the railroad— which was reverting to the Illinois Central name after selling off most of the former Gulf, Mobile & Ohio lines—sold its commuter operation to Metra.

When the IC took delivery of the principal order of Highliners in 1971-72, the cars’ silver coating was supplemented with a black and orange paint scheme, with the words “Illinois” and “Central” on either side of the center doors. The railroad’s “split-rail” emblem

appeared on both sides of the car near the engineer’s cab. By the late 1970s, the Regional Transportation

Authority, as the funding agency, replaced the railroad’s emblem with its own symbol, and had the cars repainted in the RTA’s then-current brown and orange. Ironically, the RTA’s paint scheme was more evocative

and orange paint scheme. During the 1990s Metra modified the paint scheme to give its own emblem a prominent place on the sides of the cars.

The Highliners’ interiors featured some of the most comfortable seating of any commuter railroad cars (and for many years had a pleasant new-car smell). The

orange and gold tones selected for the upholstery looked very modern when the Highliners arrived, but the same colors looked distinctively out of date as early as the 1980s, by which point more traditional, timeless colors were back in favor.

In the mid and late 1990s, Metra had most of the Highliners rehabilitated with a silver and blue paint scheme and dark blue upholstery on the seats. All cars—not only the ones in new colors—were made accessible to passengers with disabilities by removing seats close to the doors to create space for wheelchairs and installing metal bridgeplates which can span

the small gap between the car floor and the station platform. As part of this overhaul work, the space for the destination signs (which had fallen into disuse a decade earlier) were simply blanked out with no visible trace.

The Illinois Central name is no longer associated with today’s Metra Electric, nor even with the freight railroad to the east of Metra Electric’s main line. When Metra bought the electric commuter lines from the Illinois Central, the sale did not include the right to use the IC name, so Metra chose the name Metra Electric for the operation. The Illinois Central itself became part of Canadian National in 1999, which owns the non- electrified freight tracks to the east of Metra Electric.

Yet to this day, thousands of people on Chicago’s South Side and in the south suburbs still think of their familiar electric commuter service as the Illinois Central. Although the IC name has been officially

superseded, it lives on in the hearts of many—and with good reason. Even aside from the popular tendency

to use historically-established names, the IC name was associated for decades with fast, frequent, reliable service. Furthermore, in contrast to several railroads in the Northeast, the Illinois Central’s name was not tarnished in the view of its riders by years of deferred maintenance or the frequent and widespread service

disruptions that deferred maintenance often brought on.

Hyde Park Historical Society

Celebrate Hyde Park’s own gilbert and Sullivan Society at the

ANNUAL DINNER 5

Saturday, february 27, 2010 Quadrangle Club, 1155 East 57th Street Cocktails at 5:30 pm, Dinner at 6:30 pm

of the railroad’s postwar intercity streamliners (which were also painted brown and orange) than the orange and black paint that the railroad itself had earlier chosen! The additional Highliners the RTA acquired in 1978-79 were painted in the same handsome brown

1 John G. Allen, “From Commuter Rail to Regional Rail,” in Transportation Research Record 1623, Washington: Transportation Research Board, 1998, p. 130; also Joseph M. Schwieterman, Competition in Mass Transit: A Case Study of the Chicago Subscription Bus Phenomenon, Evanston: Northwestern University, Transportation Center, Nove. 1983.

Smoking Cars

Among the memories that long-time IC riders may have of the 1920s green cars was that above the vestibule doors at each end of the car interiors was a

sign designating the car as a smoking or a non-smoking car. The number of smoking cars on the longer trains fluctuated with changes in the public’s use of tobacco. Throughout most of the history of the original green electric cars, the smoking car or cars were always at the north end of the train, but it did not start that way. ➤

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Hyde Park History

ANNuAL DINNEr:

A TIME for CELEBrATIoN AND rEfLECTIoN

Top row, left to right: Caroline Cracraft thanks the Society for her Cornell Award for her chronicle of Leon and Marian Despres; Lisa Oppenheim and Frank Valadez receive their Cornell Award for the Chicago Metro History Fair. Bottom row, left to right: Peter Schoenmann, Elizabeth Kendall, and Lesa Dowd with their Despres Awards for restoring the Blackstone Library murals; Ishmael Smith, teacher Stacy Stewart, and Bryanna Stalling with their Despres Awards for successfully advocating for the landmarking of the Carl Hansberry House.

n Saturday, February 27, 2010, more than 160 guests enjoyed food, music, and reflection at

the Society’s annual dinner held at the Quadrangle Club. Highlighting the program was a celebration

of the 50th anniversary of the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company of Hyde Park and a tribute to Robert Ashenhurst, long-time Society member and co-founder of the G. and S. Company. Bob passed away ➤ 2



in October, 2009, but his spirit lives on in his music, his professional accomplishments, and his commitment to the community.

Paul Cornell Awards were bestowed upon Caroline Cracraft for chronicling the life and times of Leon and Marian Despres, and upon the Chicago Metro History Education Center for inspiring young people to learn more about Chicago’s history, especially that of Hyde Park.

attention to housing segregation in cities. Issues surrounding the house became the basis of a 1940 U.

S. Supreme Court ruling against racially restrictive housing covenants.

Elaine Smith’s piano playing provided pre-dinner music and accompaniment for Noel Taylor’s songs from

G. and S. operas. She also accompanied Helen Bailey’s vocal tribute to Bob Ashenhurst.

Haydon—he’s the one who designed all those stained glass windows for Rockefeller Chapel and then got someone to teach us Hyde Park volunteers how to cut the glass and make the windows. For several decades Doug Anderson has led people on bird walks on Wooded Island. One time a new young professor, a refugee from Russia, climbed a willow tree over the lagoon and sang Russian folk songs.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Let’s go. It’s going to be

Marian and Leon Despres Preservation Awards were granted to the group of experts involved in restoring

and preserving the historic murals in the dome of the

okay. Who’s going to attack two young mothers and their children?” So we set off.

It was a beautiful day on the Island. Spring breezes

Blackstone Library, and to students and their teacher from the Amelia Earhart School who advocated for landmark status from the Chicago City Council for the Hansberry House in West Woodlawn. This modest home was the residence of Carl Hansberry and his family, including his daughter, Lorraine Hansberry, whose 1959 play, Raisin in the Sun, called national

New Society Members

The Hyde Park Historical Society welcomes the following new members: David R. Ashenhurst, Bruce Carroll, JoAnn Scurlock and Richard H. Beal, Solvig and Harry Robertson, Mel Von H. Smith, Mary Silverstein and Deborah Wahid.

tossed the leaves of the willows and oak trees, planted at the time of the Columbian Exposition. Wild grasses and flowers greeted us as we crossed over the arched bridge to the Island. Birds sang of the beauty of the day.

We hiked along the quiet path to a grassy plot far from the rushing traffic on the nearby highway. We spread our picnic and enjoyed a quiet lunch. Then the four children frolicked in the sunshine. My friend was facing the willows that leaned over the lagoon in a deep thicket of bushes—a favorite place of fishermen. “It is beautiful here,” my friend finally said.

Suddenly a look of terror spread over her face. I turned to see what had frightened her. An ancient man was coming slowly out of the bushes. He wore a ragged dark coat distinguished by its large, decorated brass buttons dangling, one missing. He carried a bucket, a fish knife, a pole, and a few fish on a line. “He won’t hurt us,” I assured her.

He came closer. He smiled at the children. “Would you like to see what I have in my bucket?” he asked. The children were timid. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. He dumped out several small crayfish. “Thought you kids might like to play with my left-over bait.”

Relieved, my friend said, “Sure. Thanks.” The baby was afraid of the crayfish. So the man reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said, handing the baby a large brass button. His sister began to cry, seeing that her little brother had been given a shiny button to play with.

Suddenly the old man pulled out his long knife. My friend froze in horror. The old man calmly turned the knife toward himself, cut a second button from his coat, and gave it to the crying child. She stopped crying.

The old man walked quietly away.

Post script: I wrote this story many years ago. If that old man is still around, I want to thank him for restoring my faith in the kindness of human nature.

Vi Fogle Uretz was a longtime member of the Hyde Park Historical Society who passed away in May, 2007. This article was made available to Hyde Park History by her

Answer to Mystery Quiz:

The previous two observatories of the University of Chicago were the Dearborn Observatory of the first University of Chicago, built in the 1860s at 34th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, and the Kenwood

Top row, left to right: Alta Blakely is designated an HPHS Board Member Emerita by Carol Bradford; Roland Bailey tells the history of the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company of Hyde Park. Bottom row, left to right: Helen Bailey sings a tribute to Robert Ashenhurst; Noel Taylor is the Pirate King of the Pirates of Penzance.

husband, Robert Uretz, and was first published in the Hyde Park Herald on December 24, 2003. It is published here with the permission of the Hyde Park Herald.

Observatory, built in the early 1890s behind the

George Ellery Hale House at 4545 South Drexel Boulevard.

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sometimes spelled coigns or coins, are small slabs of limestone or arrangements of offset bricks, placed in the corners of buildings at regular intervals to add

strength and detail to the overall structure. The quoins of the Thompson house are handsome indeed.

The walls of the third floor surround the windows and extend upward into a peak, all detailed by

a diamond-shaped pattern of bricks known as a diaper. This odd name refers to an array of bricks distinguished by a distinct color and arrangement, as in this house. How did the term diaper, with which new parents are infinitely familiar, come to describe architectural forms made of bricks? It turns out that

the word diaper is distantly related to the more ancient term, damask, a fabric woven with rich, sometimes diamond-like patterns. In a more frugal time, mothers used cloth diapers on their children at a time when disposable diapers were a luxury. Parenting manuals advised that the most absorbent diapers were birdseye diapers, those woven in a small diamond-like pattern supposedly like the eye of a bird.

After a slog through rainy weather, we arrived at the Lillie House on the southwest corner of 58th Street and Kenwood Avenue. Tim Samuelson commented that this house, built in 1901, is his favorite of all Pond buildings. The house was built in 1901 by University of Chicago embryologist, Frank Rattray Lillie and his wife, heiress of wealth from the Crane Company, a Chicago manufacturer of bathroom fixtures. We were unable to go inside, but stood in the drizzle to examine walls detailed by bands of bricks in rows of two, three, or more. I couldn’t help thinking that, if no one were looking, these strips and projections might tempt aspiring mountain climbers to use these walls to hone their rock-climbing skills!

From the Lillie house, we walked west on 58th Street

to remarks by Sam Guard and Tim Samuelson about Pond-designed houses on the east side of the street between 55th and 57th Streets. The final stop was for a careful look at the unusual six-flat apartment building at 5515 South Woodlawn Avenue 55th Street. Instead of the traditional side-by-side placement of the sets of three apartments in most six-flat apartment buildings, the two wings of the building are at right angles to each other. Sam pointed out that this allows an efficient use of space, and showed us how the Ponds used bricks of different textures and tints to construct walls, all

of which added warmth and detail to an otherwise bland surface. Also, they opted for dark bricks used for the lowest levels of their buildings. The bricks of this building are particularly dark because they were fired much longer than ordinary bricks, charring the outer surface to almost black. Near the very top of the building’s walls are, not surprisingly—diapers!

The Pond Architectural firm was also responsible for the University Congregational Church, built in 1895 at the northwest corner of 56th Street and Dorchester Avenue. It was replaced in the early 1950s by the red brick high rise apartment building Hyde Parkers know so well. This church, and other buildings designed by the Ponds, are all described in this fine book edited by David Swan and Terry Tatum.

The final stop for this group was the Woodlawn Tap, not known for its architecture but the perfect place

to reflect on the talents of the Pond Brothers, who provided Hyde Park with some of the most distinctive buildings in Chicago. FSV

Note: Sam Guard will lead a tour of more Bond buildings in Hyde Park on Sunday, April 18. See Upcoming Events for details.

A Childhood in Early Hyde Park

By Helen Mathews Miller

In 1894, my father Shailer Matthews left Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where

he taught history and political economy, to join the new University

of Chicago being built under the presidency of William Rainey Harper. My father was Dean of the Divinity School for 25 years until his retirement in 1933. He built the three-story brick house with white trim at 5736 Woodlawn Avenue. It was said that no frame houses were permitted after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. My mother joined him after the birth

of their son and the three of them lived in the old Del Prado Hotel on 59th and Washington Street, (now Blackstone Avenue), while the house was being completed. It was the second house on the block.

Woodlawn Avenue was unpaved; cows were pastured across the street; rats scurried under the wooden board sidewalks, and it must have seemed a dreary spot to my mother coming from her New England home. The house was equipped with both electricity and natural gas (“in case the electricity should fail”). The roof

was of slate shingles brought from Maine, as were the kitchen sink and laundry tubs. The interior woodwork was the golden oak so popular at that time. There were transoms over each bedroom door which could be closed or opened for ventilation, and a speaking tube from the

Other professors arrived and built their homes up and down Woodlawn and Lexington Avenue (now University Avenue), from 55th Street to the Midway. Soon there was quite a group of children my age in our block, all boys except for Clarinda Buck and me. Thanks to my brother, all boys were kind in allowing us to join their track meets and King Arthur tournaments. There were the Jordans, the Bucks, the Herricks, the Vincents, the Loebs (who covered their back yard with gravel because it was more sanitary than grass), the Hales, and the Donaldsons. In the winter we flooded the yard for ice skating, and built forts and a toboggan slide out of huge snow balls.

We had “hose parties” in hot weather.

Papa was in great demand as a lecturer and preacher at colleges and churches all over the country, so he was away from home a great deal. Once I asked him if speaking to small groups was worthwhile. He said, “Yes, if I can enlarge their outlook even a little.” He was never ordained as a minister, preferring to teach and write. He was the author of some 20 or more books, among them The Social Teachings of Jesus, Is God

Emeritus?, The Faith of Modernism, The French Revolution, and his autobiography, New Faith for Old.

He was also very active in the Hyde Park Baptist (now Union) Church, was President of the Federal Council of Churches, and on the boards of the Northern Baptist Convention, the University of Chicago Settlement, the Chautauqua Institution, Church

Peace Union, and Kobe College, Japan. He founded and edited a news magazine, The World Today. My mother, too, was busy with outside activities: the Needlework Guild of the World, Camp Farr of the U. of C. Settlement, and Women’s Society of the Baptist Church. She was a member of Mrs. George Glessner’s Monday morning reading class at 18th and Prairie Avenue and of the “Once a Weeks,” a group of close

to the American School of Education building, built by the Pond Brothers in 1906 near Drexel Boulevard and

now part of the University of Chicago. This handsome

front bedroom to the kitchen through which one could send a piercing whistle to attract someone’s attention for the message to follow. Two of the bedrooms had gas

friends in the neighborhood, one on the board of the Chicago Orphan Asylum. ➤ 4

building was designated a Chicago landmark in 1995, and was honored with the Society’s Marian and Leon Despres Preservation Award in 2008. The building’s dark-paneled lobby, essentially unchanged since its construction, has large windows allowing light to enter from the south. Leaded glass details these windows as well as the windows of the inner doors of the vestibule. Tim Samuelson amused us with names of some of the American School’s better known graduates, including members of the Flying Wallenda family, tennis star Andrea Jaeger, and Donny Osmond.

The exterior of this building is characterized by Pond trademarks, rows of bricks and carefully placed limestone bands. And, at the very top of the eastern

Miracle on

Wooded Island

By Vi Fogle Uretz

“Oh, we can’t go there,” my friend said. “It’s too dangerous. We might get mugged.” My friend was new to Hyde Park and had heard of the dangers. The children looked at us expectantly. They had been promised a day’s outing on Wooded Island—a favorite place of mine—an island made for the World’s Fair of 1893.

When I was a student at the University of Chicago in

grates for extra warmth. The grates gave a great “plop” when lighted and smelled faintly of gas. A chute from the 3rd floor bathroom to the basement disposed of laundry. All the pipes in the house were of lead.

I was born in 1898 and recently came across the bill for my delivery by Dr. Frank Carey, $75. My sister Mary arrived four-and-one-half years later. Up to that time we had had no telephone, depending on the Quadrangle Club, then around the corner on 58th Street, for phone calls. With her birth imminent, it was thought wise to install our own phone to call the doctor. The Quadrangle Club was later moved on rollers across the campus to make way for the Oriental Institute, and the present club was erected at 57th Street and University Avenue.

flank of the building are diapers! the 1930s, Harold Haydon used to take his watercolor

After visiting the American School, we headed east, then north on Woodlawn Avenue where we were treated

painting class there. We painted pictures of the lagoon, the boats, and the ancient willows and oak trees. Harold

Above: Helen Mathews’ high school graduation photo,

Correlator, 1916.

The Mathews’ house at 5736 S. Woodlawn Avenue.

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3 Naturally, the faculty children went to the University Elementary and High School (being given half-tuition). The school had developed from the old John Dewey School my brother attended at 58th

and Ellis. I reveled in classes in art, weaving, clay modeling, woodwork, and copper shop, sewing and cooking (for both girls and boys) and especially in Miss Stillwell’s print shop where we set up type by hand and printed our own booklets of poems and Greek

and Norwegian mythology, illustrating them with drawings done in our art class. There were the usually academic subjects also, starting French in the 4th grade. American history seems to have been somewhat neglected. We were taken on field trips to the Japanese tea house on the Wooded Island and to see the Indiana sand dunes to study bugs and weeds. We were taken to the fire station on 55th Street to see a demonstration of instantaneous response to a fire alarm. Also, we visited the Lake Michigan shore to view three Spanish ships (the “Caravels”)—reproductions of those in which Columbus sailed when he discovered America, then anchored off the land where stood La Rabida Convent. The ships were donated by Spain to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

One day, when I was alone in the house, I decided to climb down the outside to the ground. I went out the window in Papa’s third floor study, dropped to the

small balcony below, climbed over the wooden railing, slid down the downspout to the roof of the front porch, and went to the north end where I could climb over the railing and slide down the long post of the porch railing below. From there, it was an easy jump from there to the ground, but I confess I arrived shaken. No one ever mentioned this exploit to me so I assume it was unknown.

On spring Saturday mornings, Connie McLaughlin, Clarinda, and I would climb into the low branches of the old willow tree in the field now occupied by Ida Noyes Hall, where we read aloud David Copperfield as we munched gumdrops and horehound candy. Clarinda and I sat on the back porch steps reading the endless Green Fairy, Blue Fairy, and Red Fairy Books, and the Little Colonel books. She believed she was a witch because she had red hair. Carroll Mason and I were champion “jack” players, inventing new tricks for that ancient game. She had a Shetland pony and would take me for drives around Washington Park.

Special treats were monthly concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Mandel Hall, and the Fuller Sisters who sang old English songs accompanied by harpsichord and harp. Sunday afternoons the children on our block were invited to Gardner Hale’s house where his mother read aloud Scott’s Ivanhoe, a little advanced for me, being four years younger than the others.

Carroll, Connie, and I would wait until the workmen had left a new house just being built and then explore

to see what we could find to collect, climbing up ladders and over loose boards. We specialized in acquiring drops of lead left by the plumbers and once were richly rewarded to find a whole cup of lead in the Frank Lloyd Wright House (nicknamed the “Dreadnaught”), then being build across the street.

The first play I ever went to was The Deceitful Dean, given by the student players, The Blackfriars.

As a member of the University Athletic Board, Papa could get free tickets to all the games. So he, Mr. Bock, Clarinda, and I attended football games in Stagg Field and basketball games in Bartlett Gymnasium.

I learned to swim in Mr. Whit’s swimming class in the Bartlett Gymnasium pool. Miss Hinman conducted a social dancing class that met in our various homes. Once a week I rode my bicycle to my music class with Miss Van Hook on Rosalie Court

(now Harper Avenue), and finally learned to play When Morning Gilds the Skies on the piano.

For Christmas we decorated the tree with strands of popcorn and cranberries, and lighted it with real candles that miraculously never caused a fire. I was usually sick with the grippe, and would be brought downstairs Christmas morning wrapped in blankets and full of calomel*. The German band would play

the old Christmas music outside each house. In spring the scissors sharpener man would appear, ringing his cheery bells, and the organ grinder, with his flea-ridden monkey, would arrive. I can still feel the monkey’s icy little hand as he clutched my penny and doffed his cap in thanks.

When the wind blew from the northwest, the air was filled with the heavy odor of the Stockyards, and we would close all our windows. But all summer the air was also filled with the beautiful strains of music from across the street as Fanny Bloomfield Zeister, the concert pianist, practiced her scales.

We had a “poor family” living on the West Side, to whom we gave clothes and food, but whom we never got to know personally. Yet they served to remind us that many were less fortunate than we were and needed help. Many of our neighbors employed Mr. Riley, a private watchman, to make the rounds at night to check windows and doors, but it was generally believed (that the reason) he came around only once a month was to collect his modest salary. Once I tested this

and strung a black thread from post to post across the front porch. It was intact the next morning. Yet no one thought it wise to dismiss him.

Our family belonged to the Hyde Park Baptist (now Union) Church. After Sunday school and church it was good to dash home to a dinner of roast chicken and chocolate ice cream. There were often guests, a visiting preacher or foreign missionary, or two college girls, as our parents were counselors of Kelly Hall, one of the University dormitories.

Every evening Larry, the lamplighter, would stop his horse in front of our house, lean his ladder up against the lamp post and light the gas lamp. Fire engines terrified me as the horses galloped down the street pulling the steaming engine and hook and ladder; we were reassured only when they had passed our house. Other familiar sounds were the “uxtra, uxtra” of the newsboy calling out some exciting news, and we would run out to buy a copy of the latest newspaper. We loved all the horses that delivered packages to us: the grocery horse, Marshall Field’s handsome pair of dappled grays, and the milk wagon horse. We slipped lumps of sugar into their feed bags whenever possible.

Help seemed to be plentiful: a cook and “scone maid” lived in and a laundress came once a week. Miss McKenzie came Saturday morning to shampoo our hair, Miss Helmar once in a while to sew and mend.

John Halstrom shoveled snow and tended the furnace in winter and mowed the grass in summer.

At Halloween we carved our pumpkin and put it, lighted up, in the oak tree in the back yard. The boys would sneak up to the Deke (Delta Kappa Epsilon) fraternity house, ring the bell, and run. If caught, they were likely to be held under a cold shower bath.

The urge to reminisce, once yielded to, is difficult to stop. From my eighties, these memories reflect my deep gratitude for a childhood spent in this pleasant and stimulating neighborhood.

*Calomel, mercurous chloride, is a yellowish-white chemical compound once used to treat a variety of ailments, including digestive upsets, skin problems, syphilis and, obviously, grippe.

This essay is taken from a document discovered by Society member, Bert Benade, who found it in papers turned over to him by Mary Irons, former Society member. We have learned from Helen Miller’s daughter, Mary Louise Williamson, who lives in Maryland, that Helen attended Vassar College from which she graduated in 1920. She married Louis Miller, with whom she adopted Mrs. Williamson and Mrs. Williamson’s sister, Mrs. Olo Kolade, now deceased. She worked for many years as a social worker for the City of Chicago where she supervised the well-being of adopted children. She died in November, 1997 at age 99, and is buried next to her husband in the Miller area of an old cemetery in Akron, Ohio. We

are grateful to Ms. Williamson and to Kerry Tulson of the Alumni Office of the University of Chicago Laboratory School for providing this information.

Hyde Park Mystery Quiz

Yerkes Observatory is the third observatory of the University of Chicago. Name one of the first two.

Coins, Diapers, and roasted Bricks: How the Pond Brothers Changed the face of Hyde Park

On Sunday, March 7, Chicago architect David Swan spoke at HPHS Headquarters to a standing-room-only crowd about the book, The Autobiography of Irving K. Pond (Hyoogen Press, Inc. 2010), edited by Swan and his colleague, Terry Tatum, Director of Research for the City of Chicago’s Landmark Division.

This dynamic presentation served to remind me why I became a member of the Hyde Park Historical Society in the first place. When I joined, I fully expected to learn about the architecture of local buildings. Like most people in Hyde Park, I was familiar with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House.

I knew about Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater and long had admired the work of Daniel Burnham on Michigan Avenue. Although I had been in the Quadrangle Club dozens of times, the name of the architect, Howard Van Doren Shaw, meant nothing to me. Irving K. Pond’s name had never crossed my lips until I connected his name with the now-landmarked American School of Education building in the heart of the University of Chicago’s ever-expanding hospital system.

Being a member of the Society has opened my eyes to local architectural treasures I might never have noticed other than to say, “Hmm—that’s a lovely house. I wonder who designed it!” or, “I love cupolas—they always remind me of a witch’s castle!” Before I heard of zoned heating—separate heat sources for different parts of a building—I wondered how owners could afford to heat the huge homes of Kenwood and Hyde Park.

On this day, I set out to learn about the legacy of the Ponds. After David Swan’s illustrated lecture, Society board member Jack Spicer, who organized the event, Chicago architectural historian Tim Samuelson, and the irrepressible Sam Guard lent their expertise and enthusiasm to a tour of local buildings designed by the Ponds. The first stop was the 1899 Thompson House on Blackstone Avenue, now the home of David and Peggy Bevington. The entrance hall of this handsome brick building, graced by serene arches and dark beams, conveys a sense of welcome to all who enter.

Large fireplaces in the main downstairs rooms are banked by glazed tiles patterned with green or golden leaves.

Outside again, our guides pointed out features we were to see in other Pond buildings. Quoins, ➤ 6

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Hyde Park History

Chicago’s Finest Transportation: The Illinois Electric

By John G. Allen and Roy G. Benedict

Seventh and final part of a series about the history of the Illinois Central Railroad’s electric commuter service.

Locals, Expresses, and Specials

Before electric service started in 1926, the Illinois Central had three classes of commuter trains: local, express, and special. A special was a train that used either the intercity or the freight tracks, and could stop at 12th Street (which an express could not do in the steam era because the express tracks bypassed the platforms). A sign on the locomotive showed the class of train and the destination. With electrification, the IC continued to operate all three types of train. The class of train was shown, along with the destination, on the roll signs mounted on each of the green

1920s electric cars. Thus, riders would see signs for a Matteson Special, a South Chicago Express, or a Hyde Park Local.

A local made all stops, thus operating on the local tracks then numbered 3 or 4 (depending on direction) between 11th Place and 51st Street (see Figure 1, p. 3 of the summer, 2007 issue of Hyde Park History; these tracks are now numbered 2 and 3 respectively, see Figure 2). An express train stopped at Roosevelt Road, then all stops to 53rd and beyond, and usually

operated on Tracks 2 and 5 (today’s tracks 1 and 4). As the number of local trains declined, there were some trains marked “43rd Street Express” in the timetable; these stopped at Roosevelt Road, then at 43rd and all stops beyond. These trains ran on the inner tracks (then numbered 3 and 4), depending on direction, in order to serve the local platforms. A special often stopped at Roosevelt Road, 53rd, 63rd and varying combinations of stops beyond (and operated on the now-abandoned far outside tracks, (then numbered 1 and 6), between Roosevelt Road and 51st Street).

In addition, there was a type of train that the railroad

When the original Highliners were new in 1971, a railroad enthusiasts’ group had an excursion (known as a “fan trip”) on the Illinois Central. The trip included stops for photos, including this one at 55th-56th-57th Streets.

This picture, looking northwest from the inbound platform, shows a brand-new Highliner on the express track and a well-washed dark green 1926 car on the local track. In front of the Highliner, a sign reads “Caution— Stand Back Of White Line”. University Apartments may be seen at the left in the distance.

designated as “local-express”. These trains made the local stops (18th through 47th) at least on request (“flag stops” in railroad parlance). Presumably the railroad wanted the passengers to think these trains provided the advantages of an express – hence the “local-express” name.

However, riders had to take the train classes on the sign readings with a grain of salt, and not entirely trust them to know whether a train would make any particular stop. For example, many specials made the three downtown stops, then 53rd, 63rd, and all stops beyond. But other specials made the three downtown stops, then all stops 53rd to 63rd, then 115th and all stops beyond. As time went by, more and more ➤ 2



combinations of stops were devised for specific trains, and the less informative the class was. In other words, the class of trains was more an art than a science.

Even before the advent of the public address systems on board trains, a trainman would often call the train from the doorway of one of the cars as the train rolled into Van Buren Street, e.g., “Fif-ty-third, Six-ty-third, Hun-dred-third, Mattes-on-Blue-Island.” As the years went by and the hand-cranked destination signs on the green cars became less cooperative, the conductors’ announcements over the public address system became a more reliable indicator than the roll signs.

After the far outer “special” tracks between 11th Place and 51st St. were removed in 1962 (and the tracks were renumbered for what was now a four- track line), the “local” designation fell out of use. This may have made sense to old-timers, but newer riders may well have wondered why a train designated as a South Chicago Express made all station stops between Randolph St. and South Chicago, or why the railroad used the term “special” for service that would only merit the term “express” on Chicago’s other commuter railroads. This created the bizarre situation whereby one of the nation’s largest commuter railroads had specials and expresses (with the expresses making all stops), but no trains designated as locals!

Just over a decade later, the IC’s management straightened out this anomaly. Ever since the 1973-74 switch to south suburban zone express service during the rush hours, there have been just two classes of train: locals and expresses. Locals generally operate

on the inside tracks (2 or 3), and expresses use the outside tracks (1 or 4), although Blue Island trains run express between downtown and 55th-56th-57th on the “local” tracks. “Zone express” trains to and from the south suburbs, with fast service bypassing all but a few stations, are today’s equivalent of the “specials” of yesteryear.

Schedules and Service

When the IC started electric service in 1926, train operations were very intensive. A November 21, 1926 schedule showed the following off-peak headways: locals to 53rd St.-Hyde Park every 20 minutes, a South Chicago express every 30 minutes, a Kensington

express every half hour, and a Matteson and Blue Island special every 45 minutes. The net result was an express running nonstop between Roosevelt Road and 53rd

St. every 15 minutes. With this frequency of service, a Hyde Park passenger hardly needed to look at a timetable before traveling.

An April 30, 1935 schedule showed even more intensive service being operated despite the Depression. Hyde Park and Woodlawn had a train

This drawing with the Adler & Sullivan signature in the lower right-hand corner shows the architects’ design for the IC’s Oakland depot at 39th St. The station was demolished in the early 1920s to make way for large- scale track rearrangements in preparation for the start of electric service in 1926. Commuters at Morgan Park— 115th St. on the Rock Island and Stone Ave., LaGrange on the Burlington still enjoy similarly handsomely-

proportioned arched doorways at those historic stations. (From Alan R. Lind, Limiteds Along the Lakefront, p.45.)

every ten minutes, for the most part expresses making no stops between Roosevelt Road and 53rd St. In addition, an occasional special to Matteson and Blue Island stopped at 53rd and 63rd Streets. (For the Century of Progress Exhibition, open during the summers of 1933 and 1934, there were South Chicago and Kensington locals making stops along the south lakefront, but this was done only to serve fairgoers.)

The September 26, 1954 schedule still reflected the high service levels that the IC needed to provide during World War II. With the lean years of the Depression behind it, the railroad was once more operating its basic Kensington and South Chicago trains as expresses (no stops between Roosevelt Road

and 53rd St.). There were half-hourly Hyde Park locals to 53rd St. As in the 1926 schedule, South Chicago expresses and Kensington expresses each operated on 20-minute headways, resulting in a train to Hyde Park and Woodlawn every 10 minutes. Blue Island expresses ran every 40 minutes, thus adding to the Hyde Park– Woodlawn service. Specials to Matteson and, since 1946, to Richton operated every 45 minutes.

In 1962, having removed all local stops between 27th and 47th Streets, the IC removed the outer tracks between 11th Place and the 50th St. tower, used by

its specials, bringing the line to its existing four-track configuration. Gone from the April 24, 1966 schedule were the Hyde Park locals. South Chicago expresses

Dr. Gregory Muelller describes the role of fungi in ecosystems.

Friends Among the Fungi

Mushrooms and toadstools were just a small part of the talk given by Dr. Gregory Muelller of the University of Chicago and Chicago Botanical Garden at the University’s Multicultural Center on Saturday, April 17, 2010. During his talk, co-sponsored by the Hyde Park Historical Society and the Jackson Park

Advisory Council, Dr. Mueller described the important role of mycorrhizal fungi in ecosystems. Mycorrhizae are fungi that form symbiotic relationships with

plants essential to the survival of both organisms. Such symbioses assure the survival of oaks, pines, and many other species of large and small plants. So important are mycorrhizae that foresters typically inoculate newly planted saplings with mycorrhizae-containing broth.

Dr. Mueller showed photographs of many kinds fungi. He responded to questions about poisonous mushrooms with dark humor, stating that, in regard to the world- wide passion for hunting mushrooms in the spring, “mushroom hunters are either bold or old but not both.”

And yes, morel mushrooms, the gold standard of American mushrooms, can be found on Wooded

Island. Ross Petersen, president of the Jackson Park Advisory Council, asserts that the exact location of these treasures is a closely held secret. FSV

New Society Members

Please welcome the following new members of the Hyde Park Historical Society: Mary Duplain, Janice Golab, Alicia Murasaki, Bella and Noel Perlman, Fred Stafford, and Vicki D. Troup.

Answer to Mystery Quiz:

The Alley “L” was the term used for the line opened in 1892 by Chicago & South Side Rapid Transit Railroad Company between Congress and 39th Streets. Except for a short section between Congress and Harrison Streets that was subsequently demolished, today’s CTA Green Line still uses this original route, hence the Alley “L” nickname. After jogging east near 40th Street, the line continues south over the alley between Prairie and Calumet Avenues.

Question and answer courtesy of John Allen.

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Rita Allen and Bill Bigelow examine early church records.

Church History Day a Success

hurch History Day at the United Church of Hyde Park on May 15 was a day for meeting friends,

for recollection, and for nostalgia. Reading from a narrative originally presented by Mrs. Gilchrest of the Church on May 5, 1910 on the occasion of the Church’s 50th anniversary, former HPHS president Carol Bradford described how a small group of committed Presbyterians grew into a thriving congregation deeply devoted to their faith and to the growth of Hyde Park.

In 1858 Paul Cornell, Hyde Park’s founder, donated land for a small white chapel to be built at the corner of what is now 53rd Street and Lake Park Avenue. A stone church was built at the northeast corner of 53rd Street and Blackstone Avenue in 1869. This church was replaced in 1889 by the larger building we know as the United Church of Hyde Park. This church resulted from the union of the Presbyterian Church with the local Congregational Church in 1930, and in

Paul Bruce examines old records.

Century and purchased by Joe from the University of Chicago. It had a black, accordion-pleated bellows more than two feet long and contained within it a shiny glass bulb as big as a grapefruit. Next to the projector lay a pair of work gloves, heavy enough for hand protection in case it became necessary to touch the very hot projector.

This program was particularly significant for Society member Rita Allen. Rita’s husband, Richard, was the grandson of Thomas and Nettie Allen, members of the Presbyterian Church. They had settled in a red brick house on South Dorchester Avenue in 1904, a house that, as Rita’s home, remains part of the family legacy. Rita was thrilled to discover the names of the entire Allen family listed in the 1913 Church Directory. FSV

(which were in fact locals by this point, although the terms “express” and “special” survived in the railroad’s lexicon until 1973) still ran every 20 minutes, but there were no longer any off-peak Kensington trains. Instead, there were shuttles meeting every other South Chicago train at 67th St. and making all stops to Kensington and Blue Island (which arrangement was short-lived). There were also Richton trains every 40 minutes.

In 1973, the railroad made its most complete schedule overhaul since the introduction of electric service in 1926. The new schedule introduced “zone express” service to the south suburbs during the rush hours, which resulted in longer nonstop runs than before. Zone express service saved time for longer- distance commuters and also made more efficient use of crews and equipment. The zone express concept originated in the mid-1960s on the New York Central’s commuter service north from New York City, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy introduced it to the Chicago area in 1970. Instead of having south suburban trains – which by then carried the bulk of the IC’s ridership – make all stops between Riverdale and Richton, the south suburban main line was divided into three zones (Riverdale to Harvey, Hazel Crest to Flossmoor, and Olympia Fields to Richton—since extended to University Park). Individual trains, running in close succession in groups of three trains, now served stations in a specific zone only.

Another important change was that off-peak headways were standardized, with trains every half hour to South Chicago, Blue Island, and Richton (the Blue Island frequency was reduced to one train per hour in 1979). The 1979 extension of service to Park Forest South – now University Park – had little effect on the railroad’s schedules. In 1982, during the depths of a region-wide financial crisis for transit, off-peak service was cut in half, with the result that today there are trains to University Park and South Chicago every hour, and trains to Blue Island every two hours.

Before the 1973 schedule changes, most of the IC’s fastest trains stopped at 53rd – Hyde Park and 63rd

Today’s Service, Tomorrow’s memories

Since 1856, the Illinois Central’s suburban service has had impacts in large ways and small. It is legendary that the railroad carried record crowds to and from the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, but few know that one of the locomotive engineers who came to Chicago to run the many extra trains was a certain John Luther Jones, who became legendary as Casey Jones after he died at the controls in an accident in 1900.1 The role of the IC in helping to develop the South Side in the decades after the Chicago Fire is well known, but few recall that Adler and Sullivan designed the 39th

St. depot, which was subsequently demolished when the railroad altered the grade profile of its near South Side line in the early-mid 1920s. More recently, the October 30, 1972 accident at 27th St. remains part of the neighborhood lore, yet few know that one of the doctors called to the scene, Dr. Eberhard H. Uhlenhuth, the head of outpatient psychiatry at Billings Hospital, led the crisis intervention for survivors and went on to establish the first such program in the country based

on his work that day. Today’s commuters who stand at the same spot each morning clutching their newspapers and coffee rarely think twice about the crews who

run the trains, and the tracks and stations that they traverse every day. Yet there is more to these people and structures than meets the eye.

The coming of electric service in 1926 revolutionized commuting on the Illinois Central to a degree

without parallel on other North American railroads. When other railroads electrified, they did so largely on already-existing tracks (although electrification projects on the New York Central, Long Island

Rail Road, Pennsylvania Railroad, and Canadian National took place in conjunction with the opening of new central city stations reached by tunnels).2 But electrification on the IC involved newly-relocated tracks and station platforms. The result was a brand- new electric commuter railroad on an existing railroad alignment.3

Those old enough to remember IC Electric travel in the years prior to the last runs of the old cars in ➤ 4

1970 with the local Methodist Church. Streets, where passengers could change between slower

Carol’s talk was illuminated by glass plate slides shown by HPHS member Joe Marlin. These plates held astonishing images of early Hyde Park: founding dignitaries including William H. Ray, first principal of Hyde Park High School, Henry Clay Work who composed the Civil War iconic song, Marching through Georgia, church officials, and notable ladies, including Mrs. George Stewart, described in church records as the “personification of womanly virtue.” The projector Joe used for the slides was a magnificent device, constructed in the early years of the 20th

Joe Marlin and Carol Bradford inspect the glass plate projector.

and faster trains. In 1973, in a change that coincided with the introduction of “zone express” service and lasted three decades, 59th St. became the IC’s express stop for the mid-South Side. With the completion of station rebuilding in 2004, the express stop shifted once again to 55th-56th-57th.

Hyde Park Mystery Quiz

What was the Alley “L?”

1 Peter A. Hansen, “The Brave Engineer,” Trains, April 2000, p. 36. 2 William D. Middleton, When the Steam Railroads Electrified, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

3 From 47th St. south, the IC alignment uses the track elevation made in 1892, in preparation for the World Columbian Exposition the next year. Further north, changes in elevation were made in the 1920s in preparation for the 1926 inauguration of electric service.

The concrete retaining walls, visible from the train, in the vicinity of 11th Place and again at 31st St. are evidence of this more recent process. For more on the grade separation issue, see C.H. Mottier, “Electrification Work Near End,” Illinois Central Magazine, June 1926; also Paul Jaenicke, “Corporate Responsibility, Chicago Style: The Story of the Illinois Central Track Elevation Project”, The Green Diamond (Illinois Central Historical Society), September 2007.

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1978 have a distinct set of memories: wooden platforms at almost all stations, the dark green car exteriors, the rattan seats inside, shades at each window (except at the benches near the doors at each end of the cars), the hand-cranked destination signs, the grinding gears of the cars’ motors, and the sharp ozone odor on hot summer days (sometimes mixing with cigarette smoke from the smoker at the north end of the train).

IC riders from the 1970s and 80s may not think their experiences differ all that greatly from today’s Metra Electric travel, but the memories of those days are already becoming history. Today, the Highliners are painted in a silver and blue scheme similar to that Metra applied to its ex-Chicago & North Western bilevel cars, which like the Highliners were made with light alloy high-tension steel bodies. (The few Highliners still painted in brown and orange were retired in early 2006 with the arrival of 26 stainless steel “New Highliners”.) Likewise, the seats have been reupholstered with the dark blue covering now standard on Metra.

The commute has changed in other ways, too. The turnstiles, which had replaced the earlier fare gates by 1974, continued in service until 2003, when Metra removed them from service. By the 1990s, Metra had replaced the wooden platforms at all south suburban main line stations, but elsewhere wood still reigned, and carpentry was a trade indispensable for station repairs.

Changes continue to affect Metra Electric in the early 21st Century. Increasingly, the wooden platforms have been making way for new precast concrete slabs. The south suburban main line stations were all rebuilt by the outset of the 1990s. Other examples include the entire South Chicago Branch. In 2004, Metra completed the rebuilding of two of the Hyde Park stations (at 53rd and 57th Streets). In 2005, the rebuilding of the Randolph St. Station changed from what looked like a recreation room in the basement of a long-neglected home into a spacious chamber that is bright, open-looking, visually interesting, and people- oriented. In 2006, Metra officially adopted the name

Millennium Station for its terminal at Randolph St., in recognition of the nearby Millennium Park.

Also in 2005-06, Metra took delivery of 26 “New Highliners.” This next generation of equipment is based on Metra’s latest coaches for its diesel lines. Once sufficient resources become available, Metra plans to order enough of the new cars to replace its existing fleet of Highliners from the 1970s.

The new Highliners are restroom-equipped for the first time in Metra Electric’s history. The IC had never equipped its commuter cars with restrooms. With

the relatively short travel distances and the premium

placed on on-board capacity, the lack of restrooms on the 1920s fleet was not an issue, nor was their lack a matter of concern on the 1970s Highliners. But with today’s commuters on the trains for longer periods

as average travel distances increase in the spatially- expanding metropolis, management decided to bring Metra Electric’s next generation of cars into line with standard practice on Metra’s other lines.

With these changes, today’s Metra Electric operations are on the verge of becoming tomorrow’s memories.

As for yesterday’s memories, the most conspicuous reminders of the original electrification are the steel lattice towers found along the main line between Randolph and Kensington, and the smaller supports for the overhead wires elsewhere on Metra Electric.

The stations that still have wooden platforms have been modified to the point where there is little left that is original. The last of the original carpenter gothic style stations with their original wooden warming houses at Bryn Mawr (71st St. and Jeffery Blvd.) and Windsor Park (75th St. and Exchange Ave.) were torn down in the late 2000s decade to make way for modern, more easily-maintained stations. These and other stations like them can only be visited in photographs and in memories. However, Chicago Rapid Transit built wooden stations in a similar style, and one of these has been preserved at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, McHenry County, Illinois.

The sentimental traveler must leave Metra Electric to find other memories of the South Side’s great electric railroad. A few of the green cars were sold for operation in excursion trains in southern Illinois and since then have migrated to Missouri and Nevada. Two “green cars” serve as shops in a mall in Barrington, Illinois.

One motor-trailer pair has been preserved at the Illinois Railway Museum. As the museum also has the first of the Illinois Central’s double-ended suburban steam engines from 1880, its collection spans much the history of the IC’s suburban service! Another reminder of years past preserved at the museum is

the neon Illinois Central Electric sign that used to call people’s attention to the inconspicuous entrance to Randolph Street Station at the southwest corner of Michigan and Randolph alongside the Chicago

Cultural Center (then the main branch of the Chicago Public Library).

Even some of the 1970s Highliners have been retired with the arrival of the “New Highliners” in 2006.

Although most of these older Highliners were sold for scrap, two cars, still wearing the orange and brown paint scheme of the late 1970s, now sit at the railroad museum at Mendota, Illinois, clearly visible from the north-side window of Amtrak trains between Chicago and Galesburg.

Evaluating the IC

Clearly, there is more to the history of the Illinois Central’s electric commuter service than meets the eye of today’s Metra Electric riders, although what they see is impressive enough. As a work of civil engineering, Metra Electric is almost without parallel in the Western hemisphere. Today’s Metra Electric remains one of a handful of electrified, commuter-carrying

rail lines in North America. Among these operations, the former Pennsylvania Railroad, the ex-New York Central, the New Haven Line and the Long Island Rail Road exceeded (and continue to exceed) the IC in their intensity of train operations, and both the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western in New Jersey and the Reading trunk in Philadelphia has historically seen levels of train service comparable to or slightly greater than the IC. To keep this in context, these lines either bring in trains from many different branch lines (Long Island, New York Central, and Reading), or have a mixture of commuter trains and frequent, fast Amtrak intercity trains (Pennsylvania, New Haven). With passenger trains regularly running 100 to 125 mph (135 mph

for the high-speed Acela Express trains), the former Pennsylvania’s New York to Washington line has the fastest operations in North America of early 20th century railroad electrifications. Neither the IC nor Metra Electric have made any attempt to emulate such speeds on their 65-mph commuter railroad.

Yet the Illinois Central/Metra Electric retains several distinctive “firsts”. It is not the only four- track commuter railroad in North America (the

Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia and New Jersey, the Reading in Philadelphia, the Long Island Rail Road and the New York Central in New York, and

the New Haven Line in New York and Connecticut also have four tracks). But it is the first (and so far, the only) one to have its locals run on the inner tracks and its expresses on the outside. This allows local trains

in four-track territory to change ends without having to cross the paths of expresses (even though Metra no longer terminates trains at such intermediate points, it was an important operating improvement at the time). Second, it preceded the Long Island Rail Road and the former New York Central and New Haven railroads

in its exclusive use of high platforms by about four decades. And finally, it is the only electric commuter rail operation in North America to have its tracks reserved for commuter trains.4

All in all, the Illinois Central deserves recognition as an early leader in introducing an overall service package combining the comfort of commuter rail with the speed, cleanliness, and frequency of rapid transit. When San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit and the Washington Metro opened in the 1970s, they were

widely seen as innovators in providing fast, frequent, and comfortable service to the city and suburbs, but in fact the IC accomplished as much when it inaugurated electric service in 1926.5

It is tempting to compare the present with the past, and to forget that in the 1920s or even the 1950s there were many more people traveling downtown by transit from the South Side than there are today. Yet for all of the changes during its years of service, the Illinois Central / Metra Electric remains one of North America’s premier commuter rail lines, and has more frequent trains than any of Chicago’s other commuter lines. Today’s Metra Electric still offers some of the best commuter rail service in the country – a fact those familiar with commuter trains in other cities can confirm.

Eight decades after electrification and more than a century after the railroad raised its tracks in

preparation for the 1893 World’s Fair, Metra Electric, the great South Side railroad that many still think of as “The IC”, remains a daily presence in Hyde Park.

In the Illinois Central Electric’s heyday, it truly deserved the railroad’s slogan, displayed proudly on the front cover of the full public timetable, “Chicago’s Finest Transportation”. Today, riders are more familiar with Metra’s slogan, “The Way to Really Fly,” but

in many ways Metra Electric remains Chicago’s finest transportation. It stands as an enduring—and

everyday—monument to its time that we can still use in ours.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to John P. Aurelius, Norm Carlson, George Chiasson, the late Edward M. DeRouin, Paul

A. Johnsen, Norman Jung, Herbert S. Levinson, Arthur H. Peterson, William Shapotkin, Michael J. Shiffer, Wesley Szerla, and A. Christopher Wilson for their assistance.

4 In decades gone past, there was a small amount of freight service on the South Chicago and Blue Island branches, and local freights also operated on Track 1 of the electrified “suburban” main line to provide carload freight service to such customers as the University of Chicago’s steam heating plant at 60th St. (which was formerly coal-fired). On rare occasions, a through passenger train was detoured onto the commuter tracks. Even a Vista-Dome car would fit under the electric wires, a fact which the IC took full advantage of when designing the double-deck Highliners.

5 The IC was not the first to introduce such a service package using electric commuter rail technology and operating practices. The New York, Westchester & Boston, a subsidiary of the New Haven Line, opened in 1912, and its frequent operations with high-level platforms throughout, ticket inspection at stations, and a four-track trunk line anticipated the IC Electric. However, the Westchester was abandoned in 1937, a victim of the Depression and its failure to provide direct service to Manhattan. See Herbert H. Harwood, The New York, Westchester & Boston Railway, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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Hyde Park History

The 1893 Midway: More than a ferris Wheel

Frances S. Vandervoort

n Saturday, July 17, a sizeable group of stalwarts braved withering temperatures and high humidity to enjoy a bit of Java at the headquarters of the Hyde Park Historical

Society. No, not coffee, but a taste of the 1893 Midway of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, where exhibits from around the world drew millions to gawk over oddly-dressed people from exotic cultures who talked in strange languages, and who danced to cacophonous music in unusual, if not minimal, costumes. On the mile-long Midway of the Columbian Exposition, people from Java, Egypt, Turkey, Dahomey, Samoa, Ireland, and numerous other exotic locales performed

Midway scene with Ferris Wheel in background

and sometimes lived, during the duration of the great fair, in carefully constructed replicas of buildings from their native lands.

Carolyn Johnson, anthropologist, musicologist, and program director in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago placed the exhibits in an oddly familiar context. A Studebaker map from 1893 clearly delineated Woodlawn and Ellis Avenues, and the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, and other markers. A photo of Java Village showed, in the background, the original Del Prado Hotel at 59th Street and what is now Dorchester Avenue.

Why did the Midway become such a success? Why did this remarkable showing of cultural diversity attract throngs of people from all over the country? ➤ 2

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1 A major reason, claims Carolyn, was the influence to exhibit their talents and wares.

of a young entrepreneur, Sol Bloom. Born In Pekin, Illinois, in 1870 to Polish-Jewish immigrants, he grew up in San Francisco where his family moved when he was an infant. He became enamored of theater business in his early teens, and when only nineteen, found his way to France to see the 1889 Paris Exposition. While admiring the brand new Eiffel Tower, he planned his next adventure, which this time would take him to Chicago, the burgeoning city on Lake Michigan in his home state of Illinois.

Chicago was selected for the Columbian Exposition

Ticket to Java Village

Java Village with old Del Prado Hotel in background

in 1890, besting New York City, St. Louis, Washington, D. C., and other cities for the honor of presenting the United States to the rest of the world. Organizers decided that Jackson Park, then 600 acres of sandy swales and marshland, would be the best site for most of the Fair’s exhibits, but Midway Plaisance, the strip of land between Cottage Grove Avenue and the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, would become the location for diverse ethnic groups from around to world

Recouping the cost of the Exposition was a challenge in even the best of circumstances, and the U. S.

had been experiencing financial woes for more than a decade. Unemployment in the early 1890s was

between 12 and 16 percent. How could the Columbian Exposition pay for itself?

Sol Bloom, then a brash 22-year-old, saw Chicago as an opportunity not to be missed. He persuaded Exposition organizers to allow him to develop the mile-long Midway Plaisance in a way that was bound to make money. While in Paris, he had cultivated

Morgari image of Columbia with entourage

contacts with performers and entrepreneurs from around the world who had produced a

huge variety of crowd-pleasing activities. Surely this kind

of entertainment could be replicated in Chicago. And Bloom was the one to do it.

He introduced visitors to the Streets of Cairo, where belly dancers in the Little Egypt exhibit titillated throngs

of visitors by dancing the “hootchy-kootchy.” Young women from Java in colorful silks and sculptured headdresses performed sensuous dances to

the seductive music of a gamelan. Javanese and Samoan men performed drumming ceremonies. And, of course, towering over all was the 264-foot-high Ferris Wheel.

A high point of Carolyn’s presentation was the playing of recordings of music from the 1893 Midway recorded on Edison wax cylinders by Benjamin Ives Gilman of Harvard University, commissioned by Mary Hemenway, a wealthy philanthropist. They were played with the permission of the Peabody Museum

oral History Project Takes a Big Step forward

The goal of the Society’s new oral history project is to produce a permanent electronic history easily accessible to students, scholars, and the community at large. Over the past years the Society and HydePark community have shown enthusiasm in preserving local history through an oral history program. Ideally, the program would bring documents and other materials to life by individuals who can place them in the context of the times in which they were written. At present, the Society has 35 tapes and transcriptions of oral

histories recorded on audiocassette tapes, and 10-15 untranscribed tapes.

Proof of community interest in oral history lies in the attendance at a community seminar at the Blackstone Library last August: more than 75 history lovers overflowed the meeting room. Recently, the Society received a generous

contribution of $500 from the Hyde Park Bank to support this project. Also, at the July 20 HPHS board meeting, members voted approval of the

overall Oral History Project as outlined in a document presented by the Oral History Committee.

Funding is needed for equipment that includes a digital tape recorder, a flip camcorder, and such

supplies as cabling and add-on electronic equipment. Also, funds would be needed for training workshops and the preparation of transcriptions. The start-up cost for ten oral histories is estimated to be $5000.

The Oral History Project Committee plans to seek support from local businesses and individuals as well as from sources beyond the Hyde Park Community. FSV

Obituaries

The Society regrets to announce the deaths of two of its members. Yaffa Draznin passed away June 23, and Harold Moody passed away earlier this year.

Answer to Mystery Quiz:

The gamelan, actually an assemblage of various instruments, including bells, gongs, woodwinds, drums, and bowed instruments. Gamelans are used in musical performances in Java, Bali, and other places in the East Indies.

frederick Douglass Chronicle Available to HPHS Members

Barry Rapoport, HPHS member and former English teacher at South Shore High School, announces that

the Chronicle he prepared in honor of abolitionist and statesman, Frederick Douglass,

is available to HPHS members and other interested individuals. The booklet contains many photos, essays, and reflections on the life of this great man. It details efforts by Barry, his students, and his friends to preserve Douglass’s

memory by installing a marker in Jackson Park immediately south of the Bowling Green on the site of the Fair’s Haitian Pavilion where, on May 15, 1893, Douglass gave a speech opening the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Send an e-mail to Barry

at: BarryRapoport@gmail.com for a digital copy of the

Chronicle as a gift. FSV

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Metro History fair Program a Success

Frances S. Vandervoort

Not long ago I chanced to meet a fellow alum of Kalamazoo Central High School, the school from which I graduated in 1953. Each of us had been reasonably good students, and had been accepted at the University of Michigan on the basis of good grades and our school’s outstanding reputation. We loved our school and appreciated the superb education it provided.

We agreed, however, that we detested the required class in American history, taught by Miss H., a prim,

Frank Valadez, Alice Chitman, Allyssa Niese, Sofia Gomez-Doyle, Allison Byrne, Olivia Daniels, Samantha Niese, and Jay Mulberry celebrate the Metro History Fair

humorless old maid (weren’t they all?) who could no more bring history to life than she could fly. My new friend and I harbored a common resentment that she refused to give us what we felt were well-deserved A’s, thus keeping us from the high honors list.

On June 12, Society members had the opportunity to see winning history projects from the 2010 Chicago Metro History Fair, projects that might not have seen the light of day in earlier times and certainly wouldn’t have been a part of Miss H.’s course at Kalamazoo Central High School. The program began with a panel

discussion led by former HPHS president Jay Mulberry, who appropriately quoted John Dewey’s tenet that education should be “learning by doing.”

Three students from Maine South High School in Park Ridge presented their project, an eye-opening diorama of the Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. This project, which they had spent endless hours constructing and was large enough to cover an entire table top, consisted of finely detailed shops and villages representing Java, Turkey, Egypt, Germany, and other countries that had participated in the great fair. Most structures the girls had built were no more than 12-15 inches high but some, including

Lincoln Park High School teacher Alicia Chipman with students Sofia Gomez-Doyle and Olivia Daniels

the model of the famous Ferris Wheel, towered high above the table. Not only were students’ creative talents demonstrated, but their knowledge about the Exposition itself soon became apparent in their oral presentations. The second project, a documentary film, “Urban Renewal in the Hyde Park/Kenwood Neighborhood,” was prepared by students who live in Hyde Park and attend Lincoln Park High School on Chicago’s near north side.

Frank Valadez, Executive Director of the Chicago Metro History Education Center at the Newberry Library, summed up the program by relating the history of the Center since its inauguration in 1970. He told of how students were required to find primary sources that included old documents and interviews with interesting people. He attached much importance to students’ presenting their projects to communities involved

with their topics. Finally, he stressed the importance of completing a history project rather than simply taking a test. With that, my fellow alum from Kalamazoo Central High School and I certainly could agree.

The Hyde Park Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the support of Nikki and Fred Stein for this program. HPH

Maine South High School students Allison Byrne, Samantha Niese, and Alyssa Niese with their project, Midway Plaisance

at Harvard. The recordings were of music from Fiji, Samoa, Wallis Island in the South Pacific, Java, Turkey, and Indian music from Vancouver Island of British Columbia, People listened with rapt attention to distinct drum rhythms and the gongs and bells of a gamelan, all easily discernible above the scratchiness and uncertain reproduction of this antiquated system.

Carolyn surprised many by pointing out that a number of the exhibits were less than authentic. The Javanese dancers actually were workers from a large tea and coffee plantation owned by prosperous Dutch colonialists. About four-fifths of the inhabitants of the Turkish village were Jews, persuaded by Bloom to come to Chicago to earn American money.

Javanese families were forced to spend the entire duration of the fair in their small thatched-roofed houses. Tragedy struck the Javanese group: a number of them sickened, died, and were buried in unmarked graves in Oak Woods Cemetery. As October and the end of the Fair approached, cooler weather caused great

Carolyn Johnson and Janice Spofford reflect on their visits to Java

discomfort among people from tropical climates.

Bloom was not beyond appealing to American prejudices to increase income. Ethnic differences were exaggerated—perhaps these peoples were “less than civilized.” Certainly they were the “other.” A large lithograph, called the “Columbia Morgari,” sums

up the American attitude toward these “primitive” peoples. In this work Columbia, a handsome, goddess-

like figure dressed in a star-embossed robe, stands in front a multitude of white American leaders including George Washington, General Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, President Grover Cleveland, all of whom seem to be floating in some type of heavenly firmament. Columbia holds high the American flag; at her feet are dark-skinned supplicants in turbans, and feathered headdresses. Some are kneeling, one lifts his hand high in obsequious tribute.

When the fair was disassembled in autumn, 1893, many of those responsible for the Midway’s success went home. Back to Indonesia and Samoa to work on coffee and tea plantations, back to Turkey to work in shops and teahouses, back to Germany to work

in the trades. Many stayed in America, contributing to the vast melting pot that has been the oft-stated,

sometimes faltering goal of this country for generations.

The question remains, was the Midway a source of education or of entertainment? Had it been

education alone, would it have succeeded as it did? If entertainment, how much was learned? HPH

Antique Clock Donated to Society

Robert Dalby, resident of Merrillville, Indiana and one of the newest Society members, has generously donated to the Society an antique Waterbury regulator clock. The clock, constructed of dark wood, has a broad white face, a pendulum, is wound by a key, and dates from the same period as the Society’s headquarters building. It be displayed with pride. Members of the Board thank Mr. Dalby for his generous contribution. FSV

Hyde Park Mystery Quiz

Which exotic musical ensemble can be found in the basement of the Hyde Park Union Church? Hint: It inspired French composer Maurice Ravel in composing his Mother Goose Suite.

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New Library has a firm foundation

Frances S. Vandervoort

In my hand lies 400 million years of Chicago’s history. Gray-white and mottled with tiny flecks and irregularities, one surface planed flat by a powerful cutting saw, this is the stuff that underlies all of Chicago. To me, this small slab of Chicago’s history

Joe and Rika Mansueto Library

is more interesting than the soaked and stained emergences of Morgan Shoal in Lake Michigan a few hundred feet east of 47th Street. It is more interesting than the coarse stuff freed from the Stony Island klint1 between 89th and 93rd Streets on Chicago’s far south side. It has as much significance for Hyde Park as the vast quantities of rock dug from the Thornton Quarry along the Tri-State Tollway south of Chicago and ground up to make expressways.

This bedrock is dolomite, a variety of limestone differing from pure limestone—calcium carbonate— in the high proportion of magnesium it contains.

Both limestone and dolomite are sedimentary rocks, precipitated from seawater of ancient oceans. A simple hand lens reveals the remains of organisms that resided in these ancient seas—ancestral corals, worms, mollusks, and other simple forms of life.

According to Sam Guard, local architectural historian, the first downtown building to rest on bedrock was the Sullivan-designed Carson Pirie Scott building, constructed in 1899. Today dolomite secures the foundations of almost all Chicago’s downtown skyscrapers. In Hyde Park, it supports the 100-ton, 72-bell carillon of Rockefeller Chapel, and forms the base of the tower of Rosenwald Hall, the University’s

1 A klint is an emerged fossilized coral or other biosedimentary rock structure that is resistant to erosion. Many of them are excavated and processed for materials used to construct buildings and highways.

first geology center dedicated in 1914. A concrete shaft constructed atop the bedrock provided stability for instruments to sense and record seismic disturbances in various parts of the world.

The chunk of dolomite in my hand was given to me by Michael Natarus, project director for the

construction of the new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library now rising at the northeast corner of 57th Street and Ellis Avenue. Mike agreed to let my husband and

me visit the construction site. He greeted us at the carefully monitored gate of the construction area one bright blue afternoon last October, thrust hard hats

into our hands, and led us down the metal staircase to the pit’s floor some 60 ft. down. There, a mixture of mud, clay, and coarse bedrock was in the process of being leveled by workers wielding large and small earth-moving equipment.

Above and around us was a high concrete wall secured to the substrate by large, bolt-like tiebacks.

A great value of the Mansueto Library is that instead of being located in a separate building in another part of campus, it is directly connected to the main building by two passageways. The larger passage is a “bridge” between the two buildings; the second passage is

a mechanical space. The glass dome above the grand reading room rises 35 feet above ground level, and consists of a vast grillwork of steel and aluminum tubing inset with high-tech glass panels that both admit light and protect the interior from direct rays of the sun. Beneath the dome are six separate levels, the lowest of which touches bedrock—the face of Chicago’s 400-million-year-old history.

The Mansuetos both graduated from the University of Chicago. Joe earned a B.A. in 1978 and an

M.B.A in 1980. Rika received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the College in 1991. In 1984

In the pit

Constructing the dome

Joe founded Morningstar, Inc., one of the world’s leading investment firms, where Rika has worked as an investment analyst. The new library was designed by world-famous architect Helmut Jahn, designer of the James R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago and other major buildings around the world, including Terminal 1 of United Airlines at O’Hare International Airport, and European Union Headquarters in Brussels. The library will house a state-of-the-

art conservation and preservation center, a special collections service area, the grand reading room, and the capacity for 3.5 million volumes of print material. Library director Judith Nadler noted that the library will be able to provide space for 22 years of new print materials.

The Historical Society is certain to benefit from its relationship with the Library, where its archive will be accessible to all. HPH

Write for Hyde Park History

We are looking for articles about historical events that have touched our community. Anyone knowing local stories, events, or people reflecting the special character of Hyde Park are encouraged to share with the membership. If you’re having trouble finding ideas, check the Society’s website: www.hydeparkhistory.org. Old articles are listed—try a new take on them! This newsletter benefits from participation from as broad a spectrum of the membership as possible.

Articles may be submitted by email to Frances S. Vandervoort, Editor, vandersand@sbcglobal.net, or to Frances S. Vandervoort, 5471 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Ill 60615. Call with questions: (773) 752-

8374.

Archive Project Complete

By Michal Safar

The Society is delighted to announce that its year- long project with Special Collections Research Center is complete. The publicly available material in the collection has increased from the original 30 boxes, collected and organized by our original Archivist, Jean Block, to 179 boxes. The added material was largely collected by Emeritus Archivist Steve Treffman and

is now organized into a detailed 92 page finding tool, which is available on-line and 100% searchable. In addition, the collection of 119 boxes of materials from the Hyde Park Cooperative Society has been organized with a separate finding tool, also available on line.

Finally, the Hyde Park Kenwood Razed Buildings collection finding tool has been revised to include street names and numbers. Maija Anderson, the archivist at SCRC in charge of the project has done an outstanding job. She and the entire Archives staff at SCRC should be recognized for their contributions to the HPHS Archives.

Those interested in exploring the archives will find a wealth of fascinating material related to Hyde Park. Follow the links below to access the finding tools.

Main Collection: http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/uncap_rs3.php?eadid=ICU. SPCL.HPHS

Hyde Park Cooperative Society: http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/uncap_rs3.php?eadid=ICU. SPCL.HPHSCOOP

Hyde Park Kenwood Razed Buildings: http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/uncap_rs3.php?eadid= ICU.SPCL.HPKRAZED

Special Collections Research Center, which houses the Hyde Park Historical Society Archives, is open to the public.

Information about accessing the collections is available at:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/

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Hyde Park History

The Civil War Touches Hyde Park

Frances S. Vandervoort

eptember 11, 2010, was a day of national reflection and remembrance. Dr. Mindy A. Schwartz, Society member and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, chose this day to describe how another national trauma—the

Civil War—affected Chicago. Dr. Schwartz has had a long-standing interest in history. In 2001, convinced that adding historical references would make clinical teaching interesting and memorable, Dr. Schwartz and medical residents created the University of Chicago History of Medicine Project, which has been an unqualified success. Dr. Schwartz has received numerous awards for her work, including being named Outstanding Clinical Teacher by senior medical students thirteen times since 1995. The history project has received national attention; Dr.

Schwartz has been asked to develop a syllabus and curriculum for use by peer institutions. She has received recognition for her work in gender equality, nutrition, and humanism in medicine.

The Civil War, endured by our nation from 1861 until 1865, led to the construction on Chicago’s south side of Camp Douglas, first a training camp for young recruits but soon a prisoner-of-war camp or Confederate soldiers. Camp Douglas, located between what is now Cottage Grove Avenue on the east and Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr., Drive on the west, and 31st to 33rd Streets north to south, was built using state funds on land originally owned by Senator Stephen A. Douglas. After Douglas’s death from typhoid fever on June 3, 1861, in Chicago’s Tremont Hotel, the

camp was appropriated by the federal government.

In her talk, Dr. Schwartz described events of the years leading up to the Civil War, including the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Abraham Lincoln had challenged Senator Stephen A. Douglas, then running for re-election in Illinois, to a series of debates to be held throughout the state. Douglas won the election, but two years later Lincoln’s principled eloquence and charisma convinced voters to elect him President of the United States. In the short time Douglas lived after the war’s onset, he became a staunch supporter

of the Union cause.

In the last half of the 19th Century, Chicago’s ➤ 2

Confederate soldier looks down on the Confederate Mound

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1 population was growing faster than any other city’s in the nation. Between 1850 and 1890,

its population increased from 30,000 to more than one million. During the four years of the war alone, numbers increased from 109,000 to 178,000. In 1848, the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal connected Chicago to the Mississippi Valley. Within a few years, the expanding rail system joined Chicago with other parts of the nation by land.

Dr. Schwartz describes conditions at Camp Douglas

Chicago’s support for the war ran deep. When war broke out, thousands of Chicago’s finest young men rushed to enlist. Their first stop was almost certainly Camp Douglas. Soon these young recruits were on the way south, carried by the Illinois Central Railroad to Cairo to join forces against Confederate rebels.

Because the war was projected to last only a few weeks, the Union had made no provisions for holding captured prisoners. It soon became obvious that a place had to be found for the prisoners. Even though not designed as a prison, Camp Douglas soon was receiving prisoners sent north on the same trains that had carried young recruits south. By February, 1862, nearly 9000 Confederate prisoners had arrived at the camp. Early on, prisoner exchanges kept the prison population

at manageable levels, but General Ulysses S. Grant eventually stopped this practice.

Dr. Schwartz’s description of problems of health, disease, and sanitation afflicting prisoners in Camp Douglas held the audience of more than 50 in rapt attention. “Sanitary conditions,” she said, “were

northeast corner of the camp, provided water for the entire facility. Formal sanitary facilities were not in place until November, 1863. Prisoners, who usually arrived with little more than the clothes upon their backs, suffered from exposure to Chicago’s harsh winters—many died. Diseases—smallpox, scarlet fever, pneumonia, measles, scurvy, and typhoid fever all took their toll. As punishment for infractions, some prisoners were forced to drag 30-pound cannon balls shackled to their ankles.

The original University of Chicago, founded by Douglas in 1857, was unhappy about the presence of a prison camp directly across 33rd Street from the campus. The University also objected to the camp’s

smallpox hospital in a converted stable just to the west of the campus.

The camp attracted a large number of opportunists— evangelists, entrepreneurs, and out-and-out troublemakers. Dwight Lyman Moody, who later founded the Moody Bible Institute, began a Sunday school to bring religion to the prisoners. Sutlers— itinerant businessmen—sold items of clothing and other goods. “Peace Democrats” opposed Lincoln and “his war.” More ominous were the “Copperheads,” Confederate sympathizers, who, in 1864, hatched a plot to free prisoners held at Camp Douglas and a prison camp in Rock Island. The plot ultimately failed, but the ensuing uproar led to a declaration of martial law in Chicago. Eventually, a military court trial in Cincinnati resulted in several convictions and a death sentence for one member of the conspiracy.

Conditions in Andersonville, the infamous Confederate prison in Georgia, were far worse than those in Camp Douglas. Andersonville, which was open only from 1864 until 1865, had no shelter or sanitary facilities at all. The death rate was far higher, and the Confederate commander, Henry Wirz, was court-martialed, tried, and sentenced to death for his role in the mistreatment of 30,000 Union soldiers.

No one knows the exact number of prisoners who perished in Camp Douglas during those terrible years, but a conservative estimate is 6,000. Bodies were first buried in the City Cemetery of Chicago, now the site of modern-day Lincoln Park. In 1867, the decision was made to move more than 5,000 bodies to Oak Woods Cemetery on the city’s south side. On this site,

Hyde Park Mystery Quiz

Which building from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was the only building designed and built as a permanent structure?

Archive Collection: Queries and Acquisitions

Archivist Michal Safar reported at the October Board Meeting that the collection of Aitchpees (Hyde Park High School yearbooks) continues to grow. She has picked up several additional “years” from used booksellers, and has learned that the 1915 Aitchpee, from the year Amelia Earhart graduated, is listed for sale at $3,500. The Society does not have this Aitchpee, but Society has Aitchpees from 44 years between 1916 and 1972. A number of posters, photographs, maps and postcards were received from a variety of sources. Other donations included Hyde Park Art Fair posters, and an arcade token found on the northeast corner of the Rose Garden of Jackson

Park. Inquiries included requests for information about inherited costume jewelry, records of relatives and former residents, and information about the Hyde Park Jazz Fest.

Society’s Oral History Committee Moves Ahead

Kathy Huff, and Lala Rodgers, Committee co- chairmen, report that the October 17, 2010, tour of two houses on Ellis Avenue was a success, grossing more than $1200. A separate report on this event is included in this issue. In addition, $4,600 has been received from contributors. An oral history program will be held at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club on Sunday, November 14, 2010. Doors will be open to the entire community who will come with tales to tell about life in Hyde Park.

Frederick Douglass Memorial Chronicle and Marker

A 7 has been omitted from Barry Rapoport’s e-mail address. Please correct it to barryrapoport7@gmail.com The Chronicle is also linked and can be downloaded

directly from http://hydepark.org/parks/jpac/ FredDougMem.htm

Barry’s web page can be viewed at this address: http://partnersatlearning.weebly.com

Answer to Mystery Quiz:

The Fine Arts Building, so designed and built because of the value of its contents—paintings, sculpture, and other artwork from around the world. This building is now the Museum of Science and Industry.

On August 21, 2010, Fred Despres, son of Robert and Louise Despres, and Lisa Ferris of Joliet were married at Glessner House, which Bob’s parents, Leon and Marian Despres had helped save from demolition in the 1960s.

abominable.” Only one water hydrant, at the

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record-making flight begins in Washington Park

On September 29, 1910, Hyde Parker Florence Cummings Hair wrote a letter to her husband, Thomas, describing the take-off of an airplane, piloted by

Walter Richard Brookins, from Washington Park on a flight to Springfield, Illinois. The letter appeared in Vol. 14, Nos. 1 and 2, of the HPHS Newsletter’s “Correspondence,” July, 1991, P. 6. HPHS archivist

Michal Safar has found more information about that the flight and its pilot, Walter Richard Brookins. Excerpts from the on-line account of the Brookins flight follow the letter.

Dear Thomas,

While my washing is “on the soak” I’m going to tell you about seeing Brookins start off for Springfield this morning to win, if possible, the $10,000 prize the Record Herald (a local newspaper published from 1901 until 1914) offers for the feat. For two days this daring fellow has attracted the most enthusiastic attention from hundreds of thousands who saw his trial flights in Grant Park. It will be interesting

to know what estimate the Record Herald will make of the crowds that filled Washington Park this morning in the

vicinity of the big meadow there. Thomas, Lenore, and I drove over about 8:50 after taking father to 42nd Street. Every person and vehicle seemed to be headed for the Park and the very air was vibrant with expectation and awe.

Policemen, mounted, kept the large meadow clear and a frame of human beings packed solid, a hundred feet deep, framed the entire open space. At the southwest corner of the meadow we could see the frail aircraft. We drove the northwest corner of the meadow and got into the large car of Mrs.

Houston with an excellent view of the field. Machines were thick everywhere. Finally the huge paddles began to revolve in trial revolutions and the crowd began to hum like a bit of the machinery itself. Then the engine was started and the dainty ship with its one occupant, strapped and wired in so that he was a very part of it, made a running, lifting motion for an incredibly short distance, then rose directly up over the trees with astonishing grace and beauty. The loud noise the engine made seemed to be apart from that magnificent sight that was the most thrilling I ever saw in all my life. Brookins flew around the meadow about 200 feet high, going directly over our heads, then slowly mounting higher and higher he sped away in the sunshine like a glistening gold dragonfly.

I can’t tell you how affecting it is to see it with your own eyes. It is nothing to read about—you must see it. And the

tremendous crowds and bands and the glorious sunshine all added to the occasion. My one thought was to have you see it, too. I was glad little Tom was there, tho’ he was engrossed in a door key! Shall we not enter this as “Red Letter Day” in his book? My whole mind is fixed on that aeroplane, speeding over the country this sunny morning. If he isn’t afraid, what a marvelous ride for that fellow! It is 185 miles there and everything seemed to be propitious as he flew away. I’m sure that hundreds of thousands were unconsciously praying for his success. I hope we will hear this afternoon.

Florence Cummings Hair

Walter Richard Brookins was born in Dayton, OH, on July 11, 1888. He first knew Orville and Wilbur Wright at the age of four, and was a student of their sister, Katherine, a schoolteacher. As a teenager he spent much time at the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, observing them testing their theories, and after their successful first flight the brothers promised Brookins a plane as soon as he was old enough. … Brookins was the first civilian pilot taught to fly by Orville Wright, taking to the air after two and a half hours of instruction, controlling a flight from start to finish on April 30, and flying alone for 12 minutes on May 6. … Brookins was one of the most daring and accomplished members of the Wright team. On July 10, 1910, at Atlantic City, he became the first person

to reach an altitude of one mile in an airplane, winning a $5,000 prize for the Wright Company from the Atlantic City Aero Club, and on September 29, 1911, he set an American distance record by flying 192 miles from Chicago to Springfield, IL, making two stops.

Although he broke with the Wright team in 1911 and retired as an instructor in 1914, Brookins remained active in aviation throughout his life. … Brookins died at his home in Hollywood, California, on April 29, 1953, after an illness of four months. He was the first aviator to be buried in the Portal of the Folded Wings, in Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park, in North Hollywood, California. FSV

Excerpted from California Digital Library, Online Archives of California, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ kt0489r3ch

New Members

DuSable Museum of African American History, Jennifer Moran, Karen and Allan Rechtschaffen, Beth Topczewski

Confederate Monument in Oak Woods Cemetery

marked by the Confederate Mound, a sculptured pink granite base holds bronze plates listing name and rank of those who died. Above the base rises a tall pillar of pale Georgia granite surmounted by a bronze figure of a Confederate soldier. With his hat tucked under his left arm as a gesture of respect, he looks down on the final resting place of his comrades. His sad face reflects the tragedy of the war and perhaps the inevitability of others to come. This monument, supported largely by private funds, was dedicated on May 30, 1895.

Dr. Schwartz’s presentation touched the hearts of the more than 50 people in attendance. Her article about Camp Douglas appeared in the Winter, 2010 issue of Hyde Park History, and can be accessed at: http://www. hydeparkhistory.org/newsletter/vol32no1_winter2010. pdf

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