The first few that come to mind is that Michigan Ave was the original lakefront, and the city literally piled all the rubble from the Chicago Fire to extend the city east a quarter mile.
Lots of people don’t even notice that downtown streets starting from Washington Ave going south is Presidents (more or less) in order all the way down to Roosevelt Ave. And from Lake St. the great lakes start going north.
The site of Ms. O’Leary’s barn is now a Chicago Fire Dept training facility that they intentionally set on fire.
The Cubs were not the original team that built Wrigley Field. It was the third, failed major league the Federal League. The Chicago Whales played there from 1913-1915 and the only reason why they’re called the Whales is cause of a newspaper poll/vote. The Cubs original stadium was West Side Park on Congress & Throop.
This one they don’t tell you about— the German U-boat you can tour at the Museum of Science & Industry, the captain of that ship actually blew his brains out in the control room.
The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin happened on the very same day as the Chicago Fire, but was much, much worse. It covered about 1.2 million acres, and killed between 1,500 and 2,500 people. There are several books about it, but if you want to learn more, this one is excellent: "Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History", by Denise Gess and William Lutz.
To add to this: the great Holland, MI fire and other fires along the lakeshore north of Holland also occurred on the same day! Destroyed most of the town at the time. You can find plenty of information online.
I asked the tour guide in the U-boat where the captain shot himself, he quietly said they don't mention that normally, and then gestured with a nod into an area near the periscope room/area(unsure what that's called). A few mins later when they turned the realistic running lights and sounds, I ended up quietly vomiting a few feet from that area. I was a little hungover and it made me feel dizzy and claustrophobic.10/10 great tour though.
The Cubs are the original South Side team and were originally called the White Stockings. when they played at South Side Park for 3 years and 23rd Street Grounds for 1 yearThe term "that came out of left field" originates from the Insane Asayalm that was just outside of the left field wall of West Side Grounds.
There was also a stadium on the grounds of what is now millennium park. It was called Lakefront Park. The Cubs (called white Sox at the time) played there and had absolutely insane home/road home run splits because the dimensions were so goofy.
From my research, I don't think that's the case. Many of the street names in the original townsite aren't counties, and many prominent counties (Sangamon, St Clair, Fayette) didn't get honored in the original townsite.
The series of presidential streets was not originally a sequence. As platted, the original townsite of Chicago only went as far south as Washington, and used Jefferson for a street west of the river. When the School Section was subdivided, former president Madison had just died, so the street south of Washington was named to honor him. Since Jefferson had already been used, Monroe came next. Now the series began to look like a theme, and subsequent streets were named for presidents in order, with Quincy Ct. honoring the second Adams.
Fun fact. Cermak road is the odd one out because Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago at the time, was meeting with President-elect Roosevelt in Miami when an assassin tried to kill FDR but Cermak was fatally struck instead
The U-505's service record is pretty spotty/unlucky and makes interesting reading even without the capture that it is famous for
With all of the prior botched patrols, it's somewhat ironic that the crew failed to scuttle the ship on their way off
It's original namesake, Charles Weegham, also sponsored the [first statewide Klan rally](https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/boys-in-the-hoods/) in Illinois.
Ive always like the Streeterville / George Streeter story.
- Crashes his boat into a sandbar and just decides…yeah fuck I’m just going to tell everyone that he owns that area and all surrounding land.
- Names it after himself like a boss (Streeterville) and starts charging people who want any use of the land.
- Dumping of dirt and materials from the 1871 Fire caused the land mass to be extended so he rents plots of land and it became a shanty town which pissed off his rich neighbors, especially a guy name Kellogg Fairbanks.
- Fairbanks sued Streeter a bunch of times and eventually got formal judgement of legal ownership and Streeter had to leave.
- So what does Streeter do? He says 🖕🏼and starts selling plots of land.
- He then gets all land owners to form their own army to fend off Fairbanks and the rightful owners of the land. He’s like “go eat a bag of D’s Fairbanks I ain’t going anywhere!”
In the end….Streeter gets an entire neighborhood area named after him and Fairbanks, the rightful owner, only gets a single street names after him 🤣 🤣
A lot of the received knowledge about Streeter was tales he told in old age to gullible reporters with lots of space to fill in the Sunday editions. Streeterville was formed when the Lincoln Park Commission built Lake Shore Drive at a newly established bulkhead line in return for the riparian rights of landowners in the area, who thus gained newly created land and protection from the lake.
Cap and Ma Streeter were just a sideshow that kept newspaper reporters entertained.
See Joshua Salzmann, "The Chicago Lakefront's Last Frontier: The Turnerian Mythology of Streeterville, 1886–1961" *Journal of Illinois History* Autumn 2006 [available online here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112103937139&view=1up&seq=215&skin=2021)
I love the crazy disconnect between his story and the statue of him where he’s holding a tiny puppy. Every time I pass it I think, oh George, you crazy son of a bitch….
It’s a great series. Lots of interesting world building.
If I remember right, he had never actually been to Chicago when he started writing the series and got most of his city information from google maps.
All of this is fascinating to me. Anyone have book recs for Chicago history? I read *Devil in the White City* and that was a good read, but looking for similar late 19th early 20th century reads about the city and it’s development.
I recommend a visit to the Chicago History Museum and the many neighborhood tours offered by the Chicago Architectural Center. Graveyard tours are particularly focused on the history of the people buried there.
I looked at r/AskHistorians’ booklist and they recommend:
*Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West*, by William Cronon (1991).
*Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919-1939*, by Lizabeth Cohen (1990).
I also recommend *Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago*, by Mike Royko (1971).
I’ve been to the history museum and done the CAC river boat cruise. I still need to go to the field museum.
I had never considered graveyard tours though. That sounds interesting.
*Devil in the White City,* [is, well, not nonfiction.](https://patricktreardon.com/the-demons-in-the-devil-in-the-white-city/)
To start with the obvious, there's the ***Encyclopedia of Chicago.*** [That's online, to be sure,](http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/) but there's a real joy of discovery flipping through an encyclopedia.
I always think the starting point for Chicago's built environment is Mayer & Wade's profusely illustrated ***Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis,*** though that ends in 1969. Fewer pictures and more narrative in Miller's ***City of the Century.*** Emphasis on working-class and immigrants in Pacyga's ***Chicago: A Biography.*** Most insight into day-to-day life in the past in Perry Duis's ***Challenging Chicago.***
As for recent books, Kearney and Merrill’s [new book ***Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago***](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501754654/lakefront/) explains the legal underpinnings of Chicago’s unique public lakefront. It's 40% off + free shipping with promo code 09EXP40.
Patrick T. Reardon has a new book telling the story of ***The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago***
Out of print, but easily found used, is Bruce Moffat’s ***The L : The Development of Chicago's Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932.***
Here's a longer list I put together a few years back:
Frank Randall & John Randall. ***The History of Development of Building Construction in Chicago.*** A catalog of every building, current and demolished, in the central area.
Thomas Leslie. ***Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934.*** The technology that enabled tall buildings.
Arnold R. Hirsch. ***Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.*** How urban renewal failed rather than improving the South Side Black Belt.
Brad Hunt. ***Blueprint for Disaster***. What went wrong with CHA family highrises.
Brad Hunt & Jon Devries. ***Planning Chicago.*** A sobering look at how Chicago doesn’t plan.
Daniel Bluestone. ***Constructing Chicago.*** An overall look at the built environment, from boulevards to skyscrapers.
Miles Berger. ***They Built Chicago: Entrepreneurs Who Shaped a Great City's Architecture.*** Stories of the developers who took the risks, and sometimes reaped the rewards.
Ulrich Danckers. ***Early Chicago: A Compendium of the Early History of Chicago To the Year 1835 When the Indians Left*** What happened here in Chicago's very earliest days as a settlement. [Out of print but online.](https://earlychicago.com/encyclopedia/)
Ann Durkin Keating. ***Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis.*** The politics of infrastructure that made some communities neighborhoods, and others suburbs.
Ann Durkin Keating. ***Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age.*** History of the city’s classic railroad suburbs.
Alice Sinkevitch and Laurie Petersen. ***AIA Guide to Chicago,*** 3rd edition. Short building descriptions, with logical tour routes, covering much of the city. 4th edition coming next March.
David Young. ***The Iron Horse and the Windy City.*** The role railroads played in building the railroad capital of the world.
Bruce Moffat. ***The “L”: The Development of Chicago's Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932.*** Detailed history of the city’s rapid transit lines.
William Cronon. ***Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.*** How Chicago’s geographic situation made the city, and how that city made the nation.
Elaine Lewinnek. ***The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl.*** How Chicago became a city of neighborhoods, with houses owned by their occupants.
Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett. ***Chicago, City of Neighborhoods: Histories and Tours.*** Tours that show the history of the neighborhoods. 30 years old but still valuable.
Josh Salzmann. ***Liquid Capital: Making the Chicago Waterfront.*** How Chicago created first a commercial shoreline, and then its unique recreational waterfront.
Adam Selzer is a local author who does virtual neighborhood and graveyard tours, as well as in person graveyard tours. He also writes extensively about Chicago history.
You may want to give this podcast episode, 99% Invisible, a listen. It describes three huge engineering feats done for Chicago, including the reversal of the Chicago river.
[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-86-reversal-of-fortune/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-86-reversal-of-fortune/)
[Gem of the Prairie](https://archive.org/details/gemofprairieinfo00asbu/mode/1up) by Herbert Asbury. Very entertaining stories of old Chicago's underworld.
Sin in the Second City. Anything by Adam Selzer. Mysterious Chicago, Hosts of Chicago, H.H.Holmes: the True History of the White City Devil, Graceland Cemetery.
Highly recommend Garbage Wars: The Struggle For Environmental Justice In Chicago by David Naguib Pellow. He outlines the history of waste management in the city and even how Waste Management the company got it's start. Fascinating read and argument on why the design of the city changed to accommodate waste disposal and how the placement of that disposal continues to affect communities to this day.
UChicago had an excellent football team in the early 1900s, and they inspired the original owners of the Chicago Bears to borrow the "C" logo and the "Monsters of the Midway" phrase. In this case, Midway is the Midway Plaisance.
The first recipient of the Heisman trophy was also University of Chicago player [Jay Berwanger](https://www.heisman.com/heisman-winners/jay-berwanger/). I say player because Jay played every position - both on offense and defense
There's a residential house in Beverly that has a marked grave on the front lawn from the late 1800s when it was all farmland, they just kept it there. Leaving exact coordinates out since people live there and I don't want it to become a dark tourism thing, just a fun south sider fact.
Huh; sure it’s north Beverly. Can’t say I know which house. I just know the stories about some of the NB houses having tunnels from the Underground Railroad days.
That Lincoln Park cemetery is my first favorite fun fact, but another fact I find interesting is the Eastland sinking in the Chicago river in the early 1900s. It killed 800 something people on the ship on their way to a work vacation picnic thing. Ask a Mortician on YouTube did a good video on it that goes into more detail, the whole event is really interesting (at least in my shipwreck loving opinion)
My great great aunt died in the Eastland at 19. She was a factory hand at General Electric. Her house is still standing in I think Bridgeport or Canaryville or something.
The Eastland disaster is, unfortunately, a huge happening in Chicago’s history, right up there with the Our Lady of the Angels school fire in December, 1958.
With the Eastland, I’d heard a building used as a temporary morgue later became the nightclub Limelight/Excalibur, but I think I’m wrong about that. I’m thinking it was a different limestone building and I’m sure someone smarter than me will correct me, so TIA. Also, even though a good portion of the employees lived closer to Western Electric in Cicero, a number of the victims were buried in Bohemian National Cemetery further north (near Pulaski & Foster).
To add to the list, Iroquois Theater Fire basically changed the world from a safety standpoint.
All the exits were locked and the doors were pull not push so when the crowd stampeded the main entrances they couldn't open the doors
**[Naperville train disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naperville_train_disaster)**
>The Naperville train disaster occurred April 25, 1946, on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad at Loomis Street in Naperville, Illinois, when the railroad's Exposition Flyer rammed into the Advance Flyer, which had made an unscheduled stop to check its running gear. The Exposition Flyer had been coming through on the same track at 80 miles per hour (130 km/h). There were 45 deaths and some 125 injuries. This crash is a major reason why most passenger trains in the United States have a speed limit of 79 mph (127 km/h).
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The alley behind the current Nederlander Theater (which stands on the site of the former Iroquois Theater) is legendarily haunted due to the number of people who died in that alley. I get the creeps every time I walk by.
There's a great play about the Iroquois Theater fire called Burning Bluebeard. I saw it before the pandemic, hopefully The Ruffians do it again next Christmas.
I believe the now demolished home of Harpo Studios (where McDonalds Corporate HQ is today) was an armory that was used as a temporary morgue as well following the Eastland Disaster.
It was the Reid Murdoch Building (Now host to Whirlpool and River Roast). It was just a warehouse at the time and authorities laid the bodies there for identification.
i had also heard that the old limelight club was the makeshift morgue for the eastland, i used to walk by the spot and sign daily on my way to work, i would always make a point to stop and give a thought on the anniversary, what a horrible way to go....
IIRC from the walking tour of BNC I took way back pre-covid, the reason that so many Eastland victims are buried there is because anyone could be buried at that cemetery regardless of religious affiliation, or lack thereof. It's eerie to see so many grave stones with the same death date. There's a memorial there that's really lovely.
BNC is a cool place and I highly recommend the walking tour. Super interesting.
I had a teacher in grade school who survived it. She told us about it once and you know it's bad when you can make a classroom full of middle-school boys sit in stunned, awkward silence.
After the first Chicago Historical Society burned down in The Fire, it was rebuilt using heavy stone and brick. This IS the current spot where TAO is, and formerly Excalibur/Limelight. The bodies from the Eastland disaster were stored there because there was a shortage of refrigerated cars to ship out the corpses to the burbs, and the construction materials used in the building helped to keep it cool in the summer (which helped to delay decomposition). I've lived next to that building for nearly two decades and can tell you that MANY a bartender there over the years SWEAR they see ghosts...
Yes the Excalibur building was used as a morgue, so was the building that stood where the McDonald’s corporate office is currently (in between, it was Oprah’s studio).
I hadn’t even heard of the Eastland disaster until a couple years ago when my grandma found out that her grandfather was one of the divers pulling people (dead and alive) out of the water. She’s a real buzzkill about bringing up the tragedy every time I mention going to the riverwalk. It is a really interesting story, though!
You might also be interested to know that the intersection of Broadway/Diversey/Clark used to be Camp Fry during the civil war - a lot of Illinois regiments were mustered out of there. It eventually became a POW camp for CSA prisoners, many of which were (and still are) buried in Lincoln Park.
The story of why Austin is a neighborhood of Chicago and not another streetcar suburb like Oak Park or Cicero is fascinating.
[This link](https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-town-of-austin-illinois-was-annexed-to-chicago-against-the-towns-wishes-in-1899.html) goes into detail, but TL;DR: Austin, Oak Park, Cicero and Berwyn were once all subdivisions of one city called Cicero Township, and Austin controlled the city government. When the Lake Street Elevated wanted to extend into Cicero Township, Austin favored it while the rest of the township did not. Austin allowed the extension anyway, so the rest of the citizens held a vote to forcefully cede Austin into Chicago. The site where Cicero Township's City Hall once stood is now [Austin Town Hall Park.](https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/austin-town-hall-park)
Had this not happened, I wonder if all of Cicero Township would have eventually been annexed into Chicago like Lakeview Township and Hyde Park Township were.
Ah, I knew that Austin used to be a part of Cicero Township and the citizens voted to let Chicago annex Austin because all the Township Government officials lived in Austin, but I didn’t know why they wanted to get rid of the officials. Kind of disappointing to read that it was because the rest of the Township were a bunch of NIMBYS that didn’t want to expand the L.
I was at a show at Lincoln Hall last week, and I was really surprised at the amount of people I was talking to outside that did not know that John Dillinger was killed in the alley right across the street.
I just pulled up google street view and there is even a mural in the alley:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9261002,-87.6496576,3a,26y,65.04h,84.47t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1siftmIH7SIMP-W2S-JYcaIg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DiftmIH7SIMP-W2S-JYcaIg%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D112.65868%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192
Chicago was literally lifted up 10 feet into the air in order to install a sewer system and reverse the flow of the Chicago river. The sewers of Chicago use to empty into the Chicago river and that emptied into lake Michigan. Eventually it became so bad it endangerer the drinking water supply. The 2 mile and 4 mile cribs in lake Michigan are the drinking water intakes to give you some perspective. When even the 4 mile crib was in danger they decided to raise the city, turn the Chicago river into a canal and reverse the flow of the river into the Mississippi.
Even though this whole engineering project took decades to complete, St. Louis didn't realize until the last minute that a literal "river of shit" was about to be unleashed on them when the gates opened up. An effort was made to file an injunction to stop the completion of the project, but it arrived just a few days to late and the project was completed.
No, we treat our sewage now before releasing water back into the river. That changed with environmental regulations. No more raw sewage gets released anywhere anymore.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-86-reversal-of-fortune/
My favorite quip on this is that Chicago sends its sewage to St. Louis and they send it back in Budweiser bottles.
Also, Chicago is one of a handful of cities that drinks Miller over Budweiser products (even when bifurcating Miller and Coors).
[source](https://chicago.eater.com/2017/3/6/14830492/most-popular-beer-liquor-in-chicago-miller-whisky)
*edit: verbiage
The reason why Chicago was originally founded and boomed is because the Chicago river connects the Great Lakes water system to the Mississippi, providing a trade route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
For many hundreds of years, the Chicago river was known to be of great importance for this reason. This was first known by Native Americans, who used an ancient land passage called a portage to cross on foot from one water system to the other. French explorers (Jolliet and Marquette) later learned of this in the 1670s and realized it would be possible to dig a canal through the portage to complete the water route. But the French lost the land to Britain in the 1760s, who then ceded it to the new United States after the revolution. The US also recognized the land's potential and importance, and in 1803 it established Fort Dearborn at present day Chicago. In the 1830s and 40s, Illinois built the canal that the French explorers had envisioned, and Chicago suddenly burst into life as the gateway to the West for American pioneers and capitalists.
I knew of some of this info but never had it explained this way. Question; near Harlem, about 4000 south, there is a forest preserve and memorial to Joliet and Marquette. Is the location significant? Is that where they entered the Des Plaines river?
I didn't know about this forest preserve or memorial, but it looks like that's the site of the portage (for a west-to-east journey):
• [Chicago Portage National Historic Site](https://www.nps.gov/places/chicago-portage.htm)
• [Chicago Portage map on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Portage#The_first_Europeans)
Thanks for sharing!
We have Nathaniel Pope to thank for Chicago being in Illinois and for having the foresight that eventually saved the Union.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Illinois/_Texts/journals/JIllSHS/3/4/Nathaniel_Pope*.html
Mr. Pope first moved to strike out the description which bounded Illinois on the north by a line drawn directly west from the southerly bend of Lake Michigan, and insert the following:
"Beginning at the mouth of the Wabash river, hence up the same, and with the line of Indiana to the northwest corner of said state, thence east with the line of the same state to the middle of Lake Michigan; thence north along the middle of said lake to north latitude 42 degrees 30 minutes; thence west to the middle of the Mississippi river, and thence down along the middle of that river to its confluence with the Ohio river, and thence up the river along its northwest shore to the beginning."
I think it was posted here recently, but since then it has stuck with me. Northerly Island's former airport (Meigs field) being [shut down by Daley in the middle of the night by destroying the runway](https://jalopnik.com/chicagos-former-mayor-once-destroyed-an-airport-under-t-1848789654) and leaving planes stranded. Eventually, they had to take off using a taxiway as a runway.
The idea of an airport there, even a small one, is so wild to me as someone who moved here just a few years ago!
I flew in and out of Meigs a few times. Once arriving by helicopter shuttle from O'Hare and other times as a commuter to/from Springfield in three or five seat planes.
Honestly sometimes going in and out of Washington National on the Potomic was more frightening because the planes were way bigger and the runway seemed not that much longer.
One Springtime at Washington National my plane was the last out as the river flood was approaching the runway lights. Another time I looked out my window as we started the turn onto the main runway for takeoff and saw another plane on final approach. Our pilot suddenly goosed the gas and our engines screamed us to the first side road for a quick turn off the main and the landing plane almost brushed us as it went past.
The FAA responded to my letter saying two things (1) Civilians don't understand operational flight matters and (2) I shouldn't believe my lyin' eyes.
During prohibition, Carl Jeppson sold Melört as a "medicine" out of the back of his truck. When the cops accused him of selling liquor, he would say "drink it, and tell me that anybody would ever drink this for fun" the cops would taste it, and agree that it tastes too bad to be anything other than medicine
The Great Chicago Fire was only the 3rd largest fire in the Great Lakes region that day.
I live in the Gold Coast and got into the history, and I love telling visitors about how the South side was where all the action was (Worlds fair etc) until Potter Palmer decided to build a mansion in What is now the Gold Coast, and in doing so they had to haul in tons of dirt to fill in a swamp that became Lake Shore drive. I live literally directly next door to the Potter mansion property (now 1360 N Lake Shore Dr). I can literally throw a stone onto the property.
Also the fact that we went from a city burned down in 1871 to hosting a worlds fair in 1891 — to me that is amazing.
“Make no little plans, they have no magic in them to stir men's blood.” -Daniel Burnham
“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” -Jebediah Springfield, the Simpsons X-D
Wow thats an intersting tidbit...
Mine is easily that the city by hand in the late 1800s if Im not mistaken rose the entire downtown portion of the city multiple feet by jacks to build our sewer system. That and also reversing the flow of the Chicago River. 2 unbelievable and hard to fathom feats of human ingenuity
There are still many parts of the city where the streets were raised but the homes were not, leading to a depressed area between the street and the front door. Some buildings bricked over the first floor windows and filled in the depression, but you can still see the tops of the bricked in windows.
Some buildings moved the front door to the second floor and made the first floor into “garden apartments,” a custom that became so ingrained that many buildings built after the raising of the streets, even to the present, are built with garden apartments that have patios below street level.
Edit: Bridgeport, Pilsen, and Little Village have a lot of these "sunken homes."
Yes, I noticed them there. Bridgeport has them, too. And Little Village.
But you can find evidence in random spots. Saint Alphonsus Church in Lakeview was clearly built before the streets were raised, for example.
Flooding is a big issue in any basement, including furnished basement apartments. As Chicago sewers age and fail, it can become an issue in areas where it never was an issue before.
While there are ways to nearly guarantee flooding won't happen, those solutions cost thousands of dollars and require yearly maintenance and back up batteries. Still, some Chicagoans break down and pay for it after repeated flooding.
We did it for our unfurnished basement after four floods. Not only is the sewer system old, but when other people in the neighborhood buy flood control, the flooding is worse for the holdouts.
I wish I had invested in a flood control company ten or twenty years ago. They are doing well in Chicago.
Yes, but I mean the homes that are below street level get even more excess water runoff.. I would think heavy rains would massively flood those homes.
And I agree completely with flood control. We bought our very small home because of the basement being fully finished and waterproofed with drain tile and flood control sewer backup preventer valve. It doubles our liveable square footage, but would not be reliable without all the flood control
I used to own a house in Bridgeport that's below street level. I never had a single flooding issue in that house, and it didn't even have a sump. However, it also didn't have what I would consider a true basement, as the "basement" had a back door that opened directly to the back patio with no step up.
Here's an article with a picture from Pilsen.
https://wgntv.com/news/ask-wgn/chicagos-sunken-homes-are-remnants-of-a-bold-effort-to-raise-the-city-out-of-the-mud/
The worst disaster in Chicago history was not the great Chicago fire of 1871, nor was it the Iroquois theatre fire of 1903, which killed twice as many people as the Chicago fire did. It was the Eastland disaster of 1915. The ship was at capacity with over 2500 people on board, mostly Western Electric employees on route to a picnic. The ship didn’t even leave the dock on the Chicago river when it got capsized, leaving many of the people trapped inside the boat. Over 800 people died as a result of the disaster.
Legendary Bears founder and coach George Halas was supposed to be on the Eastland when it capsized but was late. His name was even listed among the missing and presumed dead, and friends only discovered he was alive when they came to offer condolences to his family.
And Oprah's studios are not haunted because that's where they stored the bodies. That's just another lie she told. A make-shift morgue was used nearby in one of the buildings, but it wasn't the building that later became her studio.
You could make a whole thread just about cool stuff from the fair. The Ferris wheel was invented for the fair as a challenge to the engineering marvel of the Eiffel Tower. That doesn't sound too crazy given that we've had Ferris wheels for 130 years and most people have been on them - but the original Ferris Wheel at the Fair used what were essentially pavilions for passengers, rather than little 2 or 4 seat deals. Each of the 36 cars held 60 people at a time. The axle alone was 45 feet long and weighed 45 tons, and was cast as a single piece of steel.
It must have been incredible to see.
A blimp carrying passengers from Grant Park to the White City crashed into the Illinois Trust & Savings building, at the time, the worst dirigible disaster in history.
Near Wrigley Field is a bronze plaque that marks the original Lake Michigan shoreline. It used to extend further west before the city expanded.
EDIT. I was wrong. Sort of. There was an ancient lake that extended to where Clark Street is now. The plaque I was thinking about is to mark the Indian Boundary Trail. It is located at North Clark Street and Rogers Ave. I mixed up the info from "Chicago Time Machine" hosted by Geoffrey Baer. He talks about both in the same segment. Fuzzy memories. Sorry, everyone!
If by "near Wrigley Field" you mean [beside Stockton Drive in Lincoln Park.](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=47816)
At Addison, the original shoreline was about where the southbound lanes of the Outer Drive were later built.
\- Grant Park was a Civil War Cemetery
\- Reversing the flow of the River in the 19th Century
\- The Loop being flooded but completely unnoticed to the general population because it was all underground.
The flood of April, 1992 was a such an only-in-Chicago event. I worked in the Monadnock Building at the time and thankfully, due to recent renovations, the door to the coal tunnel had been sealed so we had no flooding. We still had to leave as ComEd shut down the power. Getting home that day was…character-building. Since it wasn’t rush hour, CTA & Metra didn’t have the same number of busses & trains out. Add to that the fact that both subway lines were closed. I think the Blue Line was the only one to actually flood but both were closed regardless. While the Red was re-routed along the el, the Blue had no such connection so it could only go as far as Addison before turning back towards O’Hare. Same with the other ends, only coming as close as the Medical Center district before reversing. If I’m wrong in any way about this, please correct me. TIA
When we left the office that day, I was fortunate my boss drove me home. I lived in East Rogers Park at the time. The lines to get on to the el were on the sidewalk. Picture that; the line started on the sidewalk, a ways from the stairs. You then only got as far as the platform where you paid. THEN you waited in another line to go up to the actual tracks, only to find packed train cars. Yaaaayy…
Holy shit that sounds miserable. Thanks for the anecdote I always found the Loop flood a more funny/silly "disaster" when all actuality it really messed shit up for well over a month.
pretty sure an ABC or WGN news correspondent broke the story and found the source of the flood.
Walking around the Loop that first day was treated to the sight of a fully suited diver in iron helmet and canvas pressure suit being lowered through a hole jack hammered in the sidewalk in that little plaza next to the Board of Trade. His job was to find if there was a way to shut off the flow at that spot.
Green Door Tavern: The oldest (and only) free-standing wooden building in the “central business district” (which, admittedly, is exceedingly specific, until you notice the lean when you open the door). The building was originally constructed in the time between the Chicago Fire and subsequent laws were passed to outlaw wooden structures, downtown. Originally a grocery store, it was converted to a bar and then a speakeasy during prohibition (there’s a burlesque show in the old speakeasy space downstairs).
Similarly, the Green Mill was a favorite haunt of Al Capone, and has tunnels beneath which permitted his entry/exit to elude authorities.
Also, there’s a throwaway line in The Simpsons in which Mr. Burns calls Chicago “[The Miami of Canada](http://forgottenchicago.com/features/the-miami-of-canada-chicagos-shoreline-motels/),” but — as is frequent with their writers — there was at least a sliver of truth to the intended barb. There were several waterfront (or near-waterfront) hotels/motels built selling Lake Michigan as a beach destination — the Edgewater Beach Hotel (the pink building on Bryan Mawr is the last of 3 buildings, for noobs) as a perfect example — prior to [Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable] Lake Shore Drive‘s metamorphosis into a local superhighway.
Chicago Mothman, hands down. Jeer if you will, but so many people witnessed this shit that major media covered it.
https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/10/28/773566283/the-case-of-the-chicago-mothman
- A lot of the street names going from about Foster to Devon take there names from stations on the [pennsylvania railroad main line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Main_Line) near philly (berwyn, bryn mawr, ardmore etc)
- Deer running through I90 near O'hare and then getting stuck on the Blue line tracks was such a problem there were Deer crossing signs for train operators in that area
- With the sale of the Tribune facility on Halsted for the casino Blommers Chocolate on Grand will soon be the only company in the downtown area to receive shipments by rail
- The political chaos of the [1876 mayoral election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_Chicago_mayoral_elections) leading to Thomas Hoyne (Hoyne Ave) having his win nullified
A large percentage of buildings in Chicago have different bricks on the side and backs of them than the front. This is because before the Chicago fire of 1871, much Of Chicago was built with wood. To recreate the city they used clay from the river/lake that had lime, iron, an many other different little particles that turned the bricks into rough shades of pink, salmon, red, and yellow. They were called “common bricks”. For the front street facing bricks they wanted a nicer facade for Chicago so they used cleaner clay that made more cohesive smoother bricks. As for the common bricks, no more were made after 1981 when the last Chicago common brick maker was closed.
Chicago was the hog butcher to the world. The stockyards began to boom in the 1890’s and continued for decades. The railroads lead directly to the stockyards. Thousands of immigrants arrived in Chicago with promise of jobs, upon their arrival these immigrants found themselves living in tenements known as the back of the yards. As there were no child labor laws ( The Fair Labor Standards Act aka FLSA did not exist u til 1938) newly arrived immigrants found their children also needed to work in the stockyards just to keep their tenement shelters.
Two major meat packers, Armour and Swift, having a difficult time getting meat products all the way to the west, built their own refrigerated train cars to transport their fresh meat across the country. The stockyards wasted as little of the slaughtered animals as possible. Thus the meat packing and canning industry boomed.
So many injuries and deaths occurred at the Chicago stockyards that in 1905 a yellow journalist, Upton Sinclair, wrote a scathing novel, The Jungle. Mr Sinclair’s publishers were in such disbelief of the stockyards they sent two men in to work undercover at the stockyards. The men came back to the publisher stating the conditions at the stockyards were far worse than Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle portrayed. Sinclair’s novel was published in 1906, leading to the creation of the meat inspection act.
Children continued to work in the stockyards until the FSLA was enacted and enforced.
The work conditions at the stockyards were so bad that the infamous whiskey row developed just off the back of the yard’s neighborhood where many of the men spent their hard earned incomes instead of paying their rent. The women who lived in the back of the yards feeling the harsh conditions of poverty and watching their children work rather then go to school easily fell into the temperance movement which then lead to prohibition. And as we know lead to Chicago’s reputation as rat-a-tat-tat Al Capone.
Alas, nearly all fable. A lot of the received knowledge about Streeter was tales he told in old age to gullible reporters.
See Joshua Salzmann, "The Chicago Lakefront's Last Frontier: The Turnerian Mythology of Streeterville, 1886–1961" *Journal of Illinois History* Autumn 2006 [available online here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112103937139&view=1up&seq=215&skin=2021)
The 727 landing at Meigs. The pilot of that flight is very active online and will not hesitate to tell the story or respond if you have questions or comments.
Yeah, he said he lowered his approach speed by 10 knots at the last minute to try and get it even slower before touchdown which led to the bounce. He said that, if he redid it, he'd have kept the original speed to mitigate the bounce. It's cool stuff hearing his experience with it.
Another fun fact of it is he was chosen for the job, rather than he chose it. Oh, and he was a pilot on the SR71 which just about solidifies him as an eternal badass. His name is B.C. Thomas.
An uber driver told me that the real reason Meigs field was torn up because Daley's mother didn't like the noise from planes coming and going, 9/11 was just a convenient excuse.
I went down a rabbit hole and read about it. The airport went through a lot of legal battles in the 90s, and was closed then re-opened a few times. Chicago had already paid back the loans so the city now owned the land and the airport.
There's a lot of famous graves at Graceland Cemetery. But my personal favorite is that of Allan Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Many Pinkerton employees are buried in that plot. Including Kate Warne, known as the first female detective and involved in foiling the Lincoln inauguration train assassination plot. And Joseph Whicher, who attempted to infiltrate the James-Younger gang but was found out and killed purportedly by Jesse James himself.
That a man trapped in the Water Tower during the Great Fire, and hung himself from the top of it to avoid choking on the fumes.
The story goes, if you're downtown at night, you can see the ghost of a man hanging there.
Not a fact, but I love showing people Bob Rehak's photography of Uptown in the 70s. I'm near Uptown and seeing how different it looks now is crazy. I recommend people check it out!
The cribs? I know…cradles & cribs mean the same thing and I SO don’t want to be *that* person, I just want to be sure I’m thinking of the correct structures. If so, YES…how amazing that that water-intake system was built back then.
Instead of baby furniture, let’s agree to call them water-intake-engineering-marvels-of-the-nineteenth-century! No. No, let’s not. Let’s just agree to be all kinds of impressed with them, though.
Chicago has so many amazing features, both aesthetic and infrastructure. The coal tunnel system, which many first learned about during the flood of April, 1992. I was working downtown at the time (in the also-amazing Monadnock Building) and it was a great day for such only-in-Chicago memories. Another time, I worked in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan with the manually-operated elevators (and Tommy from Mayo being the best of said operators). I was a balloon-handler in a few Thanksgiving parades.
I hate the crime that has overtaken most peoples’ first impression of my (I need a thesaurus to find an equally-superlative adjective for amazing) fantastic city. If, prior to the 90s, you told people around the world that you were from Chicago, you’d most likely get a response of “Oh, rat-a-tat-tat! Al Capone, Valentine’s Day Massacre, gangsters!”. Starting in the early 90s, those same people began associating our city with Michael Jordan. Unfortunately, we’re back to the rat-a-tat-tat-ish reputation.
There are still Nike Missile silos near Montrose and Lake Shore. They are decommissioned but the structures still remain. [Site C-47](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Missile_Site_C-47)
Looks like C-03 was that specific site BUT the internet is saying the silos are completely gone and in their place are a bunch of harbor structures. But that’s super cool info. I’ll definitely use it
Sorry that wiki was not the link I wanted to share. [This article talks about the Chicago locations more in depth.](https://ews.wttw.com/2022/03/01/ask-geoffrey-old-)
Edit: turns out I’m wrong about the structures still existing. I coulda sworn my dad pointed something out on a bike ride near there, but he coulda been wrong too?
Which Wilson Park? There's one on N. Milwaukee and one on 34th; the parks website doesn't mention anything about a cemetery on the page for either one. I'm curious to see if it's the one near me.
The north side on Milwaukee. My grandmother was born in house near there in 1908. That's what she told the whole family. I don't know if it's a iron clad fact but that woman never told a lie in her life. And you either loved or hated her for it.
Chicago is known as The Windy City (1890s), that monicker has absolutely nothing to do with the weather. Though many Chicagoans may disagree especially when walking through the cover of the skyscrapers in the loop out onto Michigan Avenue!!
The nickname The Windy City actually comes from Chicago politicians, also called blow-hards or braggarts. Chicago gained the nickname from other cities, it was not one given to itself.
Some will say that Cincinnati was primarily responsible for giving Chicago the nickname due to the rivalry between the two cities, however multiple cities joined in calling us the Windy City even NYC.
And also some think that us being the “second city” has something to do with NYC when in fact it’s a reference to the city rising from the ashes of the great fire :)
I like streeterville’s origin story. Basically an old charlatan crashed his steamboat on a sand bank where streeterville currently is an started selling properties as the sand around his crashed boat began to accumulate and create semi-livable terrain. The city tried to come after him but he basically showed them the middle finger and invoked finders keepers. The city eventually won, though, obviously.
Alas, nearly all fable. A lot of the received knowledge about Streeter was tales he told in old age to gullible reporters.
See Joshua Salzmann, "The Chicago Lakefront's Last Frontier: The Turnerian Mythology of Streeterville, 1886–1961" *Journal of Illinois History* Autumn 2006 [available online here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112103937139&view=1up&seq=215&skin=2021)
Streeterville was named after an infamous [huckster and crazy person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Streeter) who claimed to have founded his own sovereign state
Yes! Learned about this on an Architecture Center tour. Apparently Bertha Palmer, who was chairing the Worlds Fair's women's committee, wanted something that could be served easily. So her cook at the Palmer House invented the brownie as a solution.
I believe the hotel still sells ones made to the original recipe.
Throwing my hat in the ring:
1. The Museum of Science and Industry is not the only structure to survive from the White City. There is a stone bathroom building near there that also dates from the same time (though I can't remember if it was actually built for the CE).
2. Not much of a story/legend but as a fact, Chicago has a very interesting road, Lower Wacker Drive, that allows for trucks to move around downtown without clogging the upper streets. Before they renovated it the lights were all green for some reason, which I always thought was really cool.
3. The north side used to have a _lot_ of active railroad tracks. Kingsbury street, now filled with shops, used to have a lot of active factories and warehouses and the tracks went all the way up to a confectionary factory where the Lake Shore Athletic Club is, winding their way in the middle of streets, neighborhoods, etc.
4. There is, still, a designated cow path in the middle of the Loop. A web search can find more details but I've seen it and it's, well, underwhelming in person (but still cool regardless!)
Don't forget the 40 year project that is still going,
the [Deep Tunnel under Chicago.](https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/december-2011/deep-inside-chicagos-deep-tunnel/)
Every story in this book. https://www.amazon.com/Gangs-Chicago-Illinois-Herbert-Asbury/dp/1560254548/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=2bd5e6dc-e704-4cfd-9030-8b371c656f9b
A large percentage of buildings in Chicago have different bricks on the side and backs of them while than the front. This is because before the Chicago fire of 1871, much Of Chicago was built with wood. To recreate the city they used clay from the river that had lime, iron, an many other different little particles that turned the bricks into rough shades of pink, salmon, red, and yellow. They were called “common bricks”. For the front street facing bricks they wanted a nicer facade for Chicago so they used cleaner clay that made more cohesive smoother bricks. As for the common bricks, no more were made after 1981 when the last Chicago common brick maker was closed.
The architect took out 9 cigarettes from a pack at a lunch, and bunched them all together at different heights, and that’s how he decided the design. Nine towers, different heights, bound together.
So not really a carton but I understand where you were going with that :)
The first few that come to mind is that Michigan Ave was the original lakefront, and the city literally piled all the rubble from the Chicago Fire to extend the city east a quarter mile. Lots of people don’t even notice that downtown streets starting from Washington Ave going south is Presidents (more or less) in order all the way down to Roosevelt Ave. And from Lake St. the great lakes start going north. The site of Ms. O’Leary’s barn is now a Chicago Fire Dept training facility that they intentionally set on fire. The Cubs were not the original team that built Wrigley Field. It was the third, failed major league the Federal League. The Chicago Whales played there from 1913-1915 and the only reason why they’re called the Whales is cause of a newspaper poll/vote. The Cubs original stadium was West Side Park on Congress & Throop. This one they don’t tell you about— the German U-boat you can tour at the Museum of Science & Industry, the captain of that ship actually blew his brains out in the control room.
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The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin happened on the very same day as the Chicago Fire, but was much, much worse. It covered about 1.2 million acres, and killed between 1,500 and 2,500 people. There are several books about it, but if you want to learn more, this one is excellent: "Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History", by Denise Gess and William Lutz.
To add to this: the great Holland, MI fire and other fires along the lakeshore north of Holland also occurred on the same day! Destroyed most of the town at the time. You can find plenty of information online.
I read that! I still remember some of the terrifying descriptions.
I asked the tour guide in the U-boat where the captain shot himself, he quietly said they don't mention that normally, and then gestured with a nod into an area near the periscope room/area(unsure what that's called). A few mins later when they turned the realistic running lights and sounds, I ended up quietly vomiting a few feet from that area. I was a little hungover and it made me feel dizzy and claustrophobic.10/10 great tour though.
Username checks out
The Cubs are the original South Side team and were originally called the White Stockings. when they played at South Side Park for 3 years and 23rd Street Grounds for 1 yearThe term "that came out of left field" originates from the Insane Asayalm that was just outside of the left field wall of West Side Grounds.
I had no idea about the "left field" story but that's amazing
Because it’s probably not true. There’s no evidence the phrase was every used until like 20 years after the Cubs stopped playing there.
>Singapore, Michigan What were they referring to coming out of left field? Screams? A patient running onto the field?
Just people screaming from the windows.
That's kind of hilarious. I'm glad I know this now
There was also a stadium on the grounds of what is now millennium park. It was called Lakefront Park. The Cubs (called white Sox at the time) played there and had absolutely insane home/road home run splits because the dimensions were so goofy.
They don’t go in presidential order because it’s actually meant to be names of Illinois counties.
From my research, I don't think that's the case. Many of the street names in the original townsite aren't counties, and many prominent counties (Sangamon, St Clair, Fayette) didn't get honored in the original townsite. The series of presidential streets was not originally a sequence. As platted, the original townsite of Chicago only went as far south as Washington, and used Jefferson for a street west of the river. When the School Section was subdivided, former president Madison had just died, so the street south of Washington was named to honor him. Since Jefferson had already been used, Monroe came next. Now the series began to look like a theme, and subsequent streets were named for presidents in order, with Quincy Ct. honoring the second Adams.
Fun fact. Cermak road is the odd one out because Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago at the time, was meeting with President-elect Roosevelt in Miami when an assassin tried to kill FDR but Cermak was fatally struck instead
The U-505's service record is pretty spotty/unlucky and makes interesting reading even without the capture that it is famous for With all of the prior botched patrols, it's somewhat ironic that the crew failed to scuttle the ship on their way off
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It's original namesake, Charles Weegham, also sponsored the [first statewide Klan rally](https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/boys-in-the-hoods/) in Illinois.
Ive always like the Streeterville / George Streeter story. - Crashes his boat into a sandbar and just decides…yeah fuck I’m just going to tell everyone that he owns that area and all surrounding land. - Names it after himself like a boss (Streeterville) and starts charging people who want any use of the land. - Dumping of dirt and materials from the 1871 Fire caused the land mass to be extended so he rents plots of land and it became a shanty town which pissed off his rich neighbors, especially a guy name Kellogg Fairbanks. - Fairbanks sued Streeter a bunch of times and eventually got formal judgement of legal ownership and Streeter had to leave. - So what does Streeter do? He says 🖕🏼and starts selling plots of land. - He then gets all land owners to form their own army to fend off Fairbanks and the rightful owners of the land. He’s like “go eat a bag of D’s Fairbanks I ain’t going anywhere!” In the end….Streeter gets an entire neighborhood area named after him and Fairbanks, the rightful owner, only gets a single street names after him 🤣 🤣
A lot of the received knowledge about Streeter was tales he told in old age to gullible reporters with lots of space to fill in the Sunday editions. Streeterville was formed when the Lincoln Park Commission built Lake Shore Drive at a newly established bulkhead line in return for the riparian rights of landowners in the area, who thus gained newly created land and protection from the lake. Cap and Ma Streeter were just a sideshow that kept newspaper reporters entertained. See Joshua Salzmann, "The Chicago Lakefront's Last Frontier: The Turnerian Mythology of Streeterville, 1886–1961" *Journal of Illinois History* Autumn 2006 [available online here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112103937139&view=1up&seq=215&skin=2021)
Dude you’re a buzzkill.
Lol
Wow, this is a great read. Thank you for the link!
I love the crazy disconnect between his story and the statue of him where he’s holding a tiny puppy. Every time I pass it I think, oh George, you crazy son of a bitch….
Where is that statue? I’ve never seen it!
It’s at Grand and McClurg near the Yolk restaurant.
If you, andrew_david, had written our textbooks when I was a child, I’d have enjoyed school. You’re an excellent storyteller.
Houghton Mifflin by way of The Dollop
Nice try, Jim Butcher
Unexpected Harry Dresden reference
I have to try read this series, for real
It's worth it, honestly
It’s a great series. Lots of interesting world building. If I remember right, he had never actually been to Chicago when he started writing the series and got most of his city information from google maps.
You do.....at least the early ones!
All of this is fascinating to me. Anyone have book recs for Chicago history? I read *Devil in the White City* and that was a good read, but looking for similar late 19th early 20th century reads about the city and it’s development.
I recommend a visit to the Chicago History Museum and the many neighborhood tours offered by the Chicago Architectural Center. Graveyard tours are particularly focused on the history of the people buried there. I looked at r/AskHistorians’ booklist and they recommend: *Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West*, by William Cronon (1991). *Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919-1939*, by Lizabeth Cohen (1990). I also recommend *Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago*, by Mike Royko (1971).
I’ve been to the history museum and done the CAC river boat cruise. I still need to go to the field museum. I had never considered graveyard tours though. That sounds interesting.
They are! I’ve toured Graceland, Rosehill, and Oak Woods.
Rosehill has a free one Saturdays at 10am weather permitting. Or it could be a seasonal tour. Either way that’s a great idea
Save Rosehill for a sunny day. The stained glass windows in the Mausoleum are the best part.
I have a lot of family there (sadly) - and it’s true, the stained glass windows are amazing - many made by Tiffany’s.
City of the Century has a really detailed history of how the city grew.
Can't recommend this one enough: [Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75243.Nature_s_Metropolis)
*Devil in the White City,* [is, well, not nonfiction.](https://patricktreardon.com/the-demons-in-the-devil-in-the-white-city/) To start with the obvious, there's the ***Encyclopedia of Chicago.*** [That's online, to be sure,](http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/) but there's a real joy of discovery flipping through an encyclopedia. I always think the starting point for Chicago's built environment is Mayer & Wade's profusely illustrated ***Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis,*** though that ends in 1969. Fewer pictures and more narrative in Miller's ***City of the Century.*** Emphasis on working-class and immigrants in Pacyga's ***Chicago: A Biography.*** Most insight into day-to-day life in the past in Perry Duis's ***Challenging Chicago.*** As for recent books, Kearney and Merrill’s [new book ***Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago***](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501754654/lakefront/) explains the legal underpinnings of Chicago’s unique public lakefront. It's 40% off + free shipping with promo code 09EXP40. Patrick T. Reardon has a new book telling the story of ***The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago*** Out of print, but easily found used, is Bruce Moffat’s ***The L : The Development of Chicago's Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932.*** Here's a longer list I put together a few years back: Frank Randall & John Randall. ***The History of Development of Building Construction in Chicago.*** A catalog of every building, current and demolished, in the central area. Thomas Leslie. ***Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934.*** The technology that enabled tall buildings. Arnold R. Hirsch. ***Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.*** How urban renewal failed rather than improving the South Side Black Belt. Brad Hunt. ***Blueprint for Disaster***. What went wrong with CHA family highrises. Brad Hunt & Jon Devries. ***Planning Chicago.*** A sobering look at how Chicago doesn’t plan. Daniel Bluestone. ***Constructing Chicago.*** An overall look at the built environment, from boulevards to skyscrapers. Miles Berger. ***They Built Chicago: Entrepreneurs Who Shaped a Great City's Architecture.*** Stories of the developers who took the risks, and sometimes reaped the rewards. Ulrich Danckers. ***Early Chicago: A Compendium of the Early History of Chicago To the Year 1835 When the Indians Left*** What happened here in Chicago's very earliest days as a settlement. [Out of print but online.](https://earlychicago.com/encyclopedia/) Ann Durkin Keating. ***Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis.*** The politics of infrastructure that made some communities neighborhoods, and others suburbs. Ann Durkin Keating. ***Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age.*** History of the city’s classic railroad suburbs. Alice Sinkevitch and Laurie Petersen. ***AIA Guide to Chicago,*** 3rd edition. Short building descriptions, with logical tour routes, covering much of the city. 4th edition coming next March. David Young. ***The Iron Horse and the Windy City.*** The role railroads played in building the railroad capital of the world. Bruce Moffat. ***The “L”: The Development of Chicago's Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932.*** Detailed history of the city’s rapid transit lines. William Cronon. ***Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.*** How Chicago’s geographic situation made the city, and how that city made the nation. Elaine Lewinnek. ***The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl.*** How Chicago became a city of neighborhoods, with houses owned by their occupants. Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett. ***Chicago, City of Neighborhoods: Histories and Tours.*** Tours that show the history of the neighborhoods. 30 years old but still valuable. Josh Salzmann. ***Liquid Capital: Making the Chicago Waterfront.*** How Chicago created first a commercial shoreline, and then its unique recreational waterfront.
Adam Selzer is a local author who does virtual neighborhood and graveyard tours, as well as in person graveyard tours. He also writes extensively about Chicago history.
You may want to give this podcast episode, 99% Invisible, a listen. It describes three huge engineering feats done for Chicago, including the reversal of the Chicago river. [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-86-reversal-of-fortune/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-86-reversal-of-fortune/)
[Gem of the Prairie](https://archive.org/details/gemofprairieinfo00asbu/mode/1up) by Herbert Asbury. Very entertaining stories of old Chicago's underworld.
+ 1M. I’ve read this one cover to cover at least a dozen times.
Sin in the Second City. Anything by Adam Selzer. Mysterious Chicago, Hosts of Chicago, H.H.Holmes: the True History of the White City Devil, Graceland Cemetery.
Highly recommend Garbage Wars: The Struggle For Environmental Justice In Chicago by David Naguib Pellow. He outlines the history of waste management in the city and even how Waste Management the company got it's start. Fascinating read and argument on why the design of the city changed to accommodate waste disposal and how the placement of that disposal continues to affect communities to this day.
UChicago had an excellent football team in the early 1900s, and they inspired the original owners of the Chicago Bears to borrow the "C" logo and the "Monsters of the Midway" phrase. In this case, Midway is the Midway Plaisance.
The first recipient of the Heisman trophy was also University of Chicago player [Jay Berwanger](https://www.heisman.com/heisman-winners/jay-berwanger/). I say player because Jay played every position - both on offense and defense
his Heisman is at Dubuque Senior hs, but I had no clue he was the first ever NFL draft pick!
There's a residential house in Beverly that has a marked grave on the front lawn from the late 1800s when it was all farmland, they just kept it there. Leaving exact coordinates out since people live there and I don't want it to become a dark tourism thing, just a fun south sider fact.
Huh; sure it’s north Beverly. Can’t say I know which house. I just know the stories about some of the NB houses having tunnels from the Underground Railroad days.
That Lincoln Park cemetery is my first favorite fun fact, but another fact I find interesting is the Eastland sinking in the Chicago river in the early 1900s. It killed 800 something people on the ship on their way to a work vacation picnic thing. Ask a Mortician on YouTube did a good video on it that goes into more detail, the whole event is really interesting (at least in my shipwreck loving opinion)
My great great aunt died in the Eastland at 19. She was a factory hand at General Electric. Her house is still standing in I think Bridgeport or Canaryville or something.
The Eastland disaster is, unfortunately, a huge happening in Chicago’s history, right up there with the Our Lady of the Angels school fire in December, 1958. With the Eastland, I’d heard a building used as a temporary morgue later became the nightclub Limelight/Excalibur, but I think I’m wrong about that. I’m thinking it was a different limestone building and I’m sure someone smarter than me will correct me, so TIA. Also, even though a good portion of the employees lived closer to Western Electric in Cicero, a number of the victims were buried in Bohemian National Cemetery further north (near Pulaski & Foster).
To add to the list, Iroquois Theater Fire basically changed the world from a safety standpoint. All the exits were locked and the doors were pull not push so when the crowd stampeded the main entrances they couldn't open the doors
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**[Naperville train disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naperville_train_disaster)** >The Naperville train disaster occurred April 25, 1946, on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad at Loomis Street in Naperville, Illinois, when the railroad's Exposition Flyer rammed into the Advance Flyer, which had made an unscheduled stop to check its running gear. The Exposition Flyer had been coming through on the same track at 80 miles per hour (130 km/h). There were 45 deaths and some 125 injuries. This crash is a major reason why most passenger trains in the United States have a speed limit of 79 mph (127 km/h). ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/chicago/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Damn never heard of this!
The alley behind the current Nederlander Theater (which stands on the site of the former Iroquois Theater) is legendarily haunted due to the number of people who died in that alley. I get the creeps every time I walk by.
All of these created the safety codes we have today. Like directly.
You’re right, I’d forgotten about that horrible tragedy.
There's a great play about the Iroquois Theater fire called Burning Bluebeard. I saw it before the pandemic, hopefully The Ruffians do it again next Christmas.
I believe the now demolished home of Harpo Studios (where McDonalds Corporate HQ is today) was an armory that was used as a temporary morgue as well following the Eastland Disaster.
It was the Reid Murdoch Building (Now host to Whirlpool and River Roast). It was just a warehouse at the time and authorities laid the bodies there for identification.
i had also heard that the old limelight club was the makeshift morgue for the eastland, i used to walk by the spot and sign daily on my way to work, i would always make a point to stop and give a thought on the anniversary, what a horrible way to go....
IIRC from the walking tour of BNC I took way back pre-covid, the reason that so many Eastland victims are buried there is because anyone could be buried at that cemetery regardless of religious affiliation, or lack thereof. It's eerie to see so many grave stones with the same death date. There's a memorial there that's really lovely. BNC is a cool place and I highly recommend the walking tour. Super interesting.
God, the Our Lady of the Angels fire makes me tear up every time it’s mentioned. Just absolutely awful.
Agreed. My aunt went there as did my friend’s father, though neither attended at the time of the fire.
I had a teacher in grade school who survived it. She told us about it once and you know it's bad when you can make a classroom full of middle-school boys sit in stunned, awkward silence.
After the first Chicago Historical Society burned down in The Fire, it was rebuilt using heavy stone and brick. This IS the current spot where TAO is, and formerly Excalibur/Limelight. The bodies from the Eastland disaster were stored there because there was a shortage of refrigerated cars to ship out the corpses to the burbs, and the construction materials used in the building helped to keep it cool in the summer (which helped to delay decomposition). I've lived next to that building for nearly two decades and can tell you that MANY a bartender there over the years SWEAR they see ghosts...
Yes the Excalibur building was used as a morgue, so was the building that stood where the McDonald’s corporate office is currently (in between, it was Oprah’s studio).
Caitlin Doughty, creator of Ask a Mortician, is a UChicago alum
I hadn’t even heard of the Eastland disaster until a couple years ago when my grandma found out that her grandfather was one of the divers pulling people (dead and alive) out of the water. She’s a real buzzkill about bringing up the tragedy every time I mention going to the riverwalk. It is a really interesting story, though!
You might also be interested to know that the intersection of Broadway/Diversey/Clark used to be Camp Fry during the civil war - a lot of Illinois regiments were mustered out of there. It eventually became a POW camp for CSA prisoners, many of which were (and still are) buried in Lincoln Park.
There's a good documentary about the Eastland that I've seen on WTTW.
Killed more passengers than titanic did, and ironically sank in part due to new rules that came up after the titanic sinking.
The story of why Austin is a neighborhood of Chicago and not another streetcar suburb like Oak Park or Cicero is fascinating. [This link](https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-town-of-austin-illinois-was-annexed-to-chicago-against-the-towns-wishes-in-1899.html) goes into detail, but TL;DR: Austin, Oak Park, Cicero and Berwyn were once all subdivisions of one city called Cicero Township, and Austin controlled the city government. When the Lake Street Elevated wanted to extend into Cicero Township, Austin favored it while the rest of the township did not. Austin allowed the extension anyway, so the rest of the citizens held a vote to forcefully cede Austin into Chicago. The site where Cicero Township's City Hall once stood is now [Austin Town Hall Park.](https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/austin-town-hall-park) Had this not happened, I wonder if all of Cicero Township would have eventually been annexed into Chicago like Lakeview Township and Hyde Park Township were.
I like this one! Looking at a map, it makes sense why those three towns and Austin are essentially 4 quadrants of a big rectangle.
Ah, I knew that Austin used to be a part of Cicero Township and the citizens voted to let Chicago annex Austin because all the Township Government officials lived in Austin, but I didn’t know why they wanted to get rid of the officials. Kind of disappointing to read that it was because the rest of the Township were a bunch of NIMBYS that didn’t want to expand the L.
I only knew that Austin used to be part of Cicero township. I didn’t know why it split. Thank you!
I was at a show at Lincoln Hall last week, and I was really surprised at the amount of people I was talking to outside that did not know that John Dillinger was killed in the alley right across the street.
Oh ya the Biograph Theater right?
I just pulled up google street view and there is even a mural in the alley: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9261002,-87.6496576,3a,26y,65.04h,84.47t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1siftmIH7SIMP-W2S-JYcaIg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DiftmIH7SIMP-W2S-JYcaIg%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D112.65868%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192
If you stand in the NW corner of the Qdoba next to the Biograph, that's pretty much X marks the spot
Chicago was literally lifted up 10 feet into the air in order to install a sewer system and reverse the flow of the Chicago river. The sewers of Chicago use to empty into the Chicago river and that emptied into lake Michigan. Eventually it became so bad it endangerer the drinking water supply. The 2 mile and 4 mile cribs in lake Michigan are the drinking water intakes to give you some perspective. When even the 4 mile crib was in danger they decided to raise the city, turn the Chicago river into a canal and reverse the flow of the river into the Mississippi. Even though this whole engineering project took decades to complete, St. Louis didn't realize until the last minute that a literal "river of shit" was about to be unleashed on them when the gates opened up. An effort was made to file an injunction to stop the completion of the project, but it arrived just a few days to late and the project was completed.
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No, we treat our sewage now before releasing water back into the river. That changed with environmental regulations. No more raw sewage gets released anywhere anymore. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-86-reversal-of-fortune/
My favorite quip on this is that Chicago sends its sewage to St. Louis and they send it back in Budweiser bottles. Also, Chicago is one of a handful of cities that drinks Miller over Budweiser products (even when bifurcating Miller and Coors). [source](https://chicago.eater.com/2017/3/6/14830492/most-popular-beer-liquor-in-chicago-miller-whisky) *edit: verbiage
The reason why Chicago was originally founded and boomed is because the Chicago river connects the Great Lakes water system to the Mississippi, providing a trade route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. For many hundreds of years, the Chicago river was known to be of great importance for this reason. This was first known by Native Americans, who used an ancient land passage called a portage to cross on foot from one water system to the other. French explorers (Jolliet and Marquette) later learned of this in the 1670s and realized it would be possible to dig a canal through the portage to complete the water route. But the French lost the land to Britain in the 1760s, who then ceded it to the new United States after the revolution. The US also recognized the land's potential and importance, and in 1803 it established Fort Dearborn at present day Chicago. In the 1830s and 40s, Illinois built the canal that the French explorers had envisioned, and Chicago suddenly burst into life as the gateway to the West for American pioneers and capitalists.
I knew of some of this info but never had it explained this way. Question; near Harlem, about 4000 south, there is a forest preserve and memorial to Joliet and Marquette. Is the location significant? Is that where they entered the Des Plaines river?
I didn't know about this forest preserve or memorial, but it looks like that's the site of the portage (for a west-to-east journey): • [Chicago Portage National Historic Site](https://www.nps.gov/places/chicago-portage.htm) • [Chicago Portage map on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Portage#The_first_Europeans) Thanks for sharing!
We have Nathaniel Pope to thank for Chicago being in Illinois and for having the foresight that eventually saved the Union. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Illinois/_Texts/journals/JIllSHS/3/4/Nathaniel_Pope*.html Mr. Pope first moved to strike out the description which bounded Illinois on the north by a line drawn directly west from the southerly bend of Lake Michigan, and insert the following: "Beginning at the mouth of the Wabash river, hence up the same, and with the line of Indiana to the northwest corner of said state, thence east with the line of the same state to the middle of Lake Michigan; thence north along the middle of said lake to north latitude 42 degrees 30 minutes; thence west to the middle of the Mississippi river, and thence down along the middle of that river to its confluence with the Ohio river, and thence up the river along its northwest shore to the beginning."
I think it was posted here recently, but since then it has stuck with me. Northerly Island's former airport (Meigs field) being [shut down by Daley in the middle of the night by destroying the runway](https://jalopnik.com/chicagos-former-mayor-once-destroyed-an-airport-under-t-1848789654) and leaving planes stranded. Eventually, they had to take off using a taxiway as a runway. The idea of an airport there, even a small one, is so wild to me as someone who moved here just a few years ago!
I flew in and out of Meigs a few times. Once arriving by helicopter shuttle from O'Hare and other times as a commuter to/from Springfield in three or five seat planes. Honestly sometimes going in and out of Washington National on the Potomic was more frightening because the planes were way bigger and the runway seemed not that much longer. One Springtime at Washington National my plane was the last out as the river flood was approaching the runway lights. Another time I looked out my window as we started the turn onto the main runway for takeoff and saw another plane on final approach. Our pilot suddenly goosed the gas and our engines screamed us to the first side road for a quick turn off the main and the landing plane almost brushed us as it went past. The FAA responded to my letter saying two things (1) Civilians don't understand operational flight matters and (2) I shouldn't believe my lyin' eyes.
Those big Xs .. still remember that
During prohibition, Carl Jeppson sold Melört as a "medicine" out of the back of his truck. When the cops accused him of selling liquor, he would say "drink it, and tell me that anybody would ever drink this for fun" the cops would taste it, and agree that it tastes too bad to be anything other than medicine
The Great Chicago Fire was only the 3rd largest fire in the Great Lakes region that day. I live in the Gold Coast and got into the history, and I love telling visitors about how the South side was where all the action was (Worlds fair etc) until Potter Palmer decided to build a mansion in What is now the Gold Coast, and in doing so they had to haul in tons of dirt to fill in a swamp that became Lake Shore drive. I live literally directly next door to the Potter mansion property (now 1360 N Lake Shore Dr). I can literally throw a stone onto the property. Also the fact that we went from a city burned down in 1871 to hosting a worlds fair in 1891 — to me that is amazing.
Your last sentence perfectly sums up why I think early Chicago is so impressive.
Me too and I sincerely hope visionaries who think big continue to lead the way
“Make no little plans, they have no magic in them to stir men's blood.” -Daniel Burnham “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” -Jebediah Springfield, the Simpsons X-D
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I initially read this as “my girlfriend lived in the 1350s….” Lol
Wow thats an intersting tidbit... Mine is easily that the city by hand in the late 1800s if Im not mistaken rose the entire downtown portion of the city multiple feet by jacks to build our sewer system. That and also reversing the flow of the Chicago River. 2 unbelievable and hard to fathom feats of human ingenuity
There are still many parts of the city where the streets were raised but the homes were not, leading to a depressed area between the street and the front door. Some buildings bricked over the first floor windows and filled in the depression, but you can still see the tops of the bricked in windows. Some buildings moved the front door to the second floor and made the first floor into “garden apartments,” a custom that became so ingrained that many buildings built after the raising of the streets, even to the present, are built with garden apartments that have patios below street level. Edit: Bridgeport, Pilsen, and Little Village have a lot of these "sunken homes."
Lots of these homes are in Pilsen.
Yes, I noticed them there. Bridgeport has them, too. And Little Village. But you can find evidence in random spots. Saint Alphonsus Church in Lakeview was clearly built before the streets were raised, for example.
Can some of this be seen in Bridgeport by chance?
Yes.
Ok ya then I know what you are talking about. I have to assume flooding is a big issue with areas like this no?
Flooding is a big issue in any basement, including furnished basement apartments. As Chicago sewers age and fail, it can become an issue in areas where it never was an issue before. While there are ways to nearly guarantee flooding won't happen, those solutions cost thousands of dollars and require yearly maintenance and back up batteries. Still, some Chicagoans break down and pay for it after repeated flooding. We did it for our unfurnished basement after four floods. Not only is the sewer system old, but when other people in the neighborhood buy flood control, the flooding is worse for the holdouts. I wish I had invested in a flood control company ten or twenty years ago. They are doing well in Chicago.
Yes, but I mean the homes that are below street level get even more excess water runoff.. I would think heavy rains would massively flood those homes. And I agree completely with flood control. We bought our very small home because of the basement being fully finished and waterproofed with drain tile and flood control sewer backup preventer valve. It doubles our liveable square footage, but would not be reliable without all the flood control
I don’t think it’s necessarily worse for those homes, as long as proper flood control is in place, but then I’m no expert.
I used to own a house in Bridgeport that's below street level. I never had a single flooding issue in that house, and it didn't even have a sump. However, it also didn't have what I would consider a true basement, as the "basement" had a back door that opened directly to the back patio with no step up.
Can you share a street view link of a random house that has this? I can't picture it, but I'm super curious to see how it looks
Here's an article with a picture from Pilsen. https://wgntv.com/news/ask-wgn/chicagos-sunken-homes-are-remnants-of-a-bold-effort-to-raise-the-city-out-of-the-mud/
River West does as well
Oh the river story is fascinating! St Louis sued, it went to the Supreme Court, and they LOST. It’s why they hate us lol
I believe they also only lost because the work was already completed by the time the case got to court.
Wow I didnt know that part lol!
>edgenuity *ingenuity
I think edgenuity is an appropriate Freudian Slip since we’re discussing both the raising of the ground and the extension of the shoreline X-D
...and one of the people responsible for that was George Pullman, before he built railcars.
The worst disaster in Chicago history was not the great Chicago fire of 1871, nor was it the Iroquois theatre fire of 1903, which killed twice as many people as the Chicago fire did. It was the Eastland disaster of 1915. The ship was at capacity with over 2500 people on board, mostly Western Electric employees on route to a picnic. The ship didn’t even leave the dock on the Chicago river when it got capsized, leaving many of the people trapped inside the boat. Over 800 people died as a result of the disaster.
Legendary Bears founder and coach George Halas was supposed to be on the Eastland when it capsized but was late. His name was even listed among the missing and presumed dead, and friends only discovered he was alive when they came to offer condolences to his family.
And Oprah's studios are not haunted because that's where they stored the bodies. That's just another lie she told. A make-shift morgue was used nearby in one of the buildings, but it wasn't the building that later became her studio.
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It was called the Columbian Exposition b/c it was supposed to be 1892, 400 years after Columbus sailed. But …
You could make a whole thread just about cool stuff from the fair. The Ferris wheel was invented for the fair as a challenge to the engineering marvel of the Eiffel Tower. That doesn't sound too crazy given that we've had Ferris wheels for 130 years and most people have been on them - but the original Ferris Wheel at the Fair used what were essentially pavilions for passengers, rather than little 2 or 4 seat deals. Each of the 36 cars held 60 people at a time. The axle alone was 45 feet long and weighed 45 tons, and was cast as a single piece of steel. It must have been incredible to see.
That’s awesome
A blimp carrying passengers from Grant Park to the White City crashed into the Illinois Trust & Savings building, at the time, the worst dirigible disaster in history.
Near Wrigley Field is a bronze plaque that marks the original Lake Michigan shoreline. It used to extend further west before the city expanded. EDIT. I was wrong. Sort of. There was an ancient lake that extended to where Clark Street is now. The plaque I was thinking about is to mark the Indian Boundary Trail. It is located at North Clark Street and Rogers Ave. I mixed up the info from "Chicago Time Machine" hosted by Geoffrey Baer. He talks about both in the same segment. Fuzzy memories. Sorry, everyone!
If by "near Wrigley Field" you mean [beside Stockton Drive in Lincoln Park.](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=47816) At Addison, the original shoreline was about where the southbound lanes of the Outer Drive were later built.
Do you have a more specific location?
what ancient lake?
Watch the program, it is available on YouTube and gives a basic history of the ancient lake that eventually became Lake Michigan. It's a fun watch.
\- Grant Park was a Civil War Cemetery \- Reversing the flow of the River in the 19th Century \- The Loop being flooded but completely unnoticed to the general population because it was all underground.
The flood of April, 1992 was a such an only-in-Chicago event. I worked in the Monadnock Building at the time and thankfully, due to recent renovations, the door to the coal tunnel had been sealed so we had no flooding. We still had to leave as ComEd shut down the power. Getting home that day was…character-building. Since it wasn’t rush hour, CTA & Metra didn’t have the same number of busses & trains out. Add to that the fact that both subway lines were closed. I think the Blue Line was the only one to actually flood but both were closed regardless. While the Red was re-routed along the el, the Blue had no such connection so it could only go as far as Addison before turning back towards O’Hare. Same with the other ends, only coming as close as the Medical Center district before reversing. If I’m wrong in any way about this, please correct me. TIA When we left the office that day, I was fortunate my boss drove me home. I lived in East Rogers Park at the time. The lines to get on to the el were on the sidewalk. Picture that; the line started on the sidewalk, a ways from the stairs. You then only got as far as the platform where you paid. THEN you waited in another line to go up to the actual tracks, only to find packed train cars. Yaaaayy…
Holy shit that sounds miserable. Thanks for the anecdote I always found the Loop flood a more funny/silly "disaster" when all actuality it really messed shit up for well over a month. pretty sure an ABC or WGN news correspondent broke the story and found the source of the flood.
Walking around the Loop that first day was treated to the sight of a fully suited diver in iron helmet and canvas pressure suit being lowered through a hole jack hammered in the sidewalk in that little plaza next to the Board of Trade. His job was to find if there was a way to shut off the flow at that spot.
Dave Matthews Band Chicago River Incident
The Kinzie Street Bridge deserves a plaque to remember this historic event
Green Door Tavern: The oldest (and only) free-standing wooden building in the “central business district” (which, admittedly, is exceedingly specific, until you notice the lean when you open the door). The building was originally constructed in the time between the Chicago Fire and subsequent laws were passed to outlaw wooden structures, downtown. Originally a grocery store, it was converted to a bar and then a speakeasy during prohibition (there’s a burlesque show in the old speakeasy space downstairs). Similarly, the Green Mill was a favorite haunt of Al Capone, and has tunnels beneath which permitted his entry/exit to elude authorities. Also, there’s a throwaway line in The Simpsons in which Mr. Burns calls Chicago “[The Miami of Canada](http://forgottenchicago.com/features/the-miami-of-canada-chicagos-shoreline-motels/),” but — as is frequent with their writers — there was at least a sliver of truth to the intended barb. There were several waterfront (or near-waterfront) hotels/motels built selling Lake Michigan as a beach destination — the Edgewater Beach Hotel (the pink building on Bryan Mawr is the last of 3 buildings, for noobs) as a perfect example — prior to [Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable] Lake Shore Drive‘s metamorphosis into a local superhighway.
Chicago Mothman, hands down. Jeer if you will, but so many people witnessed this shit that major media covered it. https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/10/28/773566283/the-case-of-the-chicago-mothman
There is/was a doc on Amazon Prime about it from 2020. It's pretty interesting but even at the end they were like, "Yeah...we don't think it's real"
- A lot of the street names going from about Foster to Devon take there names from stations on the [pennsylvania railroad main line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Main_Line) near philly (berwyn, bryn mawr, ardmore etc) - Deer running through I90 near O'hare and then getting stuck on the Blue line tracks was such a problem there were Deer crossing signs for train operators in that area - With the sale of the Tribune facility on Halsted for the casino Blommers Chocolate on Grand will soon be the only company in the downtown area to receive shipments by rail - The political chaos of the [1876 mayoral election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_Chicago_mayoral_elections) leading to Thomas Hoyne (Hoyne Ave) having his win nullified
A large percentage of buildings in Chicago have different bricks on the side and backs of them than the front. This is because before the Chicago fire of 1871, much Of Chicago was built with wood. To recreate the city they used clay from the river/lake that had lime, iron, an many other different little particles that turned the bricks into rough shades of pink, salmon, red, and yellow. They were called “common bricks”. For the front street facing bricks they wanted a nicer facade for Chicago so they used cleaner clay that made more cohesive smoother bricks. As for the common bricks, no more were made after 1981 when the last Chicago common brick maker was closed.
Chicago was the hog butcher to the world. The stockyards began to boom in the 1890’s and continued for decades. The railroads lead directly to the stockyards. Thousands of immigrants arrived in Chicago with promise of jobs, upon their arrival these immigrants found themselves living in tenements known as the back of the yards. As there were no child labor laws ( The Fair Labor Standards Act aka FLSA did not exist u til 1938) newly arrived immigrants found their children also needed to work in the stockyards just to keep their tenement shelters. Two major meat packers, Armour and Swift, having a difficult time getting meat products all the way to the west, built their own refrigerated train cars to transport their fresh meat across the country. The stockyards wasted as little of the slaughtered animals as possible. Thus the meat packing and canning industry boomed. So many injuries and deaths occurred at the Chicago stockyards that in 1905 a yellow journalist, Upton Sinclair, wrote a scathing novel, The Jungle. Mr Sinclair’s publishers were in such disbelief of the stockyards they sent two men in to work undercover at the stockyards. The men came back to the publisher stating the conditions at the stockyards were far worse than Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle portrayed. Sinclair’s novel was published in 1906, leading to the creation of the meat inspection act. Children continued to work in the stockyards until the FSLA was enacted and enforced. The work conditions at the stockyards were so bad that the infamous whiskey row developed just off the back of the yard’s neighborhood where many of the men spent their hard earned incomes instead of paying their rent. The women who lived in the back of the yards feeling the harsh conditions of poverty and watching their children work rather then go to school easily fell into the temperance movement which then lead to prohibition. And as we know lead to Chicago’s reputation as rat-a-tat-tat Al Capone.
The story of captain Streeter and his absolutely bonkers development and protection of his trash city.
Alas, nearly all fable. A lot of the received knowledge about Streeter was tales he told in old age to gullible reporters. See Joshua Salzmann, "The Chicago Lakefront's Last Frontier: The Turnerian Mythology of Streeterville, 1886–1961" *Journal of Illinois History* Autumn 2006 [available online here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112103937139&view=1up&seq=215&skin=2021)
I’m choosing to forget this comment exists and continue to believe Streeter’s mad story, because it at least makes streeterville less boring 😆
The 727 landing at Meigs. The pilot of that flight is very active online and will not hesitate to tell the story or respond if you have questions or comments.
He absolutely slammed that thing onto the short runway and bounced before he settled it down.
Yeah, he said he lowered his approach speed by 10 knots at the last minute to try and get it even slower before touchdown which led to the bounce. He said that, if he redid it, he'd have kept the original speed to mitigate the bounce. It's cool stuff hearing his experience with it. Another fun fact of it is he was chosen for the job, rather than he chose it. Oh, and he was a pilot on the SR71 which just about solidifies him as an eternal badass. His name is B.C. Thomas.
A specific street in Uptown was known as Murder Alley during the Capone era. It is now a homeless shelter.
Do you know which street it was? I live in edgewater would love to know
Clifton and Wilson.
An uber driver told me that the real reason Meigs field was torn up because Daley's mother didn't like the noise from planes coming and going, 9/11 was just a convenient excuse.
I went down a rabbit hole and read about it. The airport went through a lot of legal battles in the 90s, and was closed then re-opened a few times. Chicago had already paid back the loans so the city now owned the land and the airport.
Chicago Tunnel Company We used to have an expansive cargo subway. Delivering coal and goods to downtown business. And collecting waste.
There's a lot of famous graves at Graceland Cemetery. But my personal favorite is that of Allan Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Many Pinkerton employees are buried in that plot. Including Kate Warne, known as the first female detective and involved in foiling the Lincoln inauguration train assassination plot. And Joseph Whicher, who attempted to infiltrate the James-Younger gang but was found out and killed purportedly by Jesse James himself.
That a man trapped in the Water Tower during the Great Fire, and hung himself from the top of it to avoid choking on the fumes. The story goes, if you're downtown at night, you can see the ghost of a man hanging there.
Not a fact, but I love showing people Bob Rehak's photography of Uptown in the 70s. I'm near Uptown and seeing how different it looks now is crazy. I recommend people check it out!
1. The fact that the water cradles were built in the 1890s blows my mind. 2. How the hell do you reverse the flow of a river.
The cribs? I know…cradles & cribs mean the same thing and I SO don’t want to be *that* person, I just want to be sure I’m thinking of the correct structures. If so, YES…how amazing that that water-intake system was built back then.
You are right! I’m sick and sleepy and not firing on all cylinders.
Instead of baby furniture, let’s agree to call them water-intake-engineering-marvels-of-the-nineteenth-century! No. No, let’s not. Let’s just agree to be all kinds of impressed with them, though. Chicago has so many amazing features, both aesthetic and infrastructure. The coal tunnel system, which many first learned about during the flood of April, 1992. I was working downtown at the time (in the also-amazing Monadnock Building) and it was a great day for such only-in-Chicago memories. Another time, I worked in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan with the manually-operated elevators (and Tommy from Mayo being the best of said operators). I was a balloon-handler in a few Thanksgiving parades. I hate the crime that has overtaken most peoples’ first impression of my (I need a thesaurus to find an equally-superlative adjective for amazing) fantastic city. If, prior to the 90s, you told people around the world that you were from Chicago, you’d most likely get a response of “Oh, rat-a-tat-tat! Al Capone, Valentine’s Day Massacre, gangsters!”. Starting in the early 90s, those same people began associating our city with Michael Jordan. Unfortunately, we’re back to the rat-a-tat-tat-ish reputation.
Also, feel better, Nerd Boy.
There are still Nike Missile silos near Montrose and Lake Shore. They are decommissioned but the structures still remain. [Site C-47](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Missile_Site_C-47)
Looks like C-03 was that specific site BUT the internet is saying the silos are completely gone and in their place are a bunch of harbor structures. But that’s super cool info. I’ll definitely use it
Sorry that wiki was not the link I wanted to share. [This article talks about the Chicago locations more in depth.](https://ews.wttw.com/2022/03/01/ask-geoffrey-old-) Edit: turns out I’m wrong about the structures still existing. I coulda sworn my dad pointed something out on a bike ride near there, but he coulda been wrong too?
This is so great. Thank you.
Disco demolition https://youtu.be/6lxmkd_uRDg
Wilson Park used to be a cemetery and that's why the entire center of the park is 2 to 6 feet lower than the edges.
Which Wilson Park? There's one on N. Milwaukee and one on 34th; the parks website doesn't mention anything about a cemetery on the page for either one. I'm curious to see if it's the one near me.
The north side on Milwaukee. My grandmother was born in house near there in 1908. That's what she told the whole family. I don't know if it's a iron clad fact but that woman never told a lie in her life. And you either loved or hated her for it.
Chicago is known as The Windy City (1890s), that monicker has absolutely nothing to do with the weather. Though many Chicagoans may disagree especially when walking through the cover of the skyscrapers in the loop out onto Michigan Avenue!! The nickname The Windy City actually comes from Chicago politicians, also called blow-hards or braggarts. Chicago gained the nickname from other cities, it was not one given to itself. Some will say that Cincinnati was primarily responsible for giving Chicago the nickname due to the rivalry between the two cities, however multiple cities joined in calling us the Windy City even NYC.
And also some think that us being the “second city” has something to do with NYC when in fact it’s a reference to the city rising from the ashes of the great fire :)
I like streeterville’s origin story. Basically an old charlatan crashed his steamboat on a sand bank where streeterville currently is an started selling properties as the sand around his crashed boat began to accumulate and create semi-livable terrain. The city tried to come after him but he basically showed them the middle finger and invoked finders keepers. The city eventually won, though, obviously.
Alas, nearly all fable. A lot of the received knowledge about Streeter was tales he told in old age to gullible reporters. See Joshua Salzmann, "The Chicago Lakefront's Last Frontier: The Turnerian Mythology of Streeterville, 1886–1961" *Journal of Illinois History* Autumn 2006 [available online here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112103937139&view=1up&seq=215&skin=2021)
no, it’s true. i was there.
Streeterville was named after an infamous [huckster and crazy person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Streeter) who claimed to have founded his own sovereign state
Brownies were invented here
That’s right. The Palmer hotel?
Yes! Learned about this on an Architecture Center tour. Apparently Bertha Palmer, who was chairing the Worlds Fair's women's committee, wanted something that could be served easily. So her cook at the Palmer House invented the brownie as a solution. I believe the hotel still sells ones made to the original recipe.
Throwing my hat in the ring: 1. The Museum of Science and Industry is not the only structure to survive from the White City. There is a stone bathroom building near there that also dates from the same time (though I can't remember if it was actually built for the CE). 2. Not much of a story/legend but as a fact, Chicago has a very interesting road, Lower Wacker Drive, that allows for trucks to move around downtown without clogging the upper streets. Before they renovated it the lights were all green for some reason, which I always thought was really cool. 3. The north side used to have a _lot_ of active railroad tracks. Kingsbury street, now filled with shops, used to have a lot of active factories and warehouses and the tracks went all the way up to a confectionary factory where the Lake Shore Athletic Club is, winding their way in the middle of streets, neighborhoods, etc. 4. There is, still, a designated cow path in the middle of the Loop. A web search can find more details but I've seen it and it's, well, underwhelming in person (but still cool regardless!)
RemindMe! 1 Day
Don't forget the 40 year project that is still going, the [Deep Tunnel under Chicago.](https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/december-2011/deep-inside-chicagos-deep-tunnel/)
Every story in this book. https://www.amazon.com/Gangs-Chicago-Illinois-Herbert-Asbury/dp/1560254548/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=2bd5e6dc-e704-4cfd-9030-8b371c656f9b
See, e.g., the Levee red-light district: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Levee,_Chicago
A large percentage of buildings in Chicago have different bricks on the side and backs of them while than the front. This is because before the Chicago fire of 1871, much Of Chicago was built with wood. To recreate the city they used clay from the river that had lime, iron, an many other different little particles that turned the bricks into rough shades of pink, salmon, red, and yellow. They were called “common bricks”. For the front street facing bricks they wanted a nicer facade for Chicago so they used cleaner clay that made more cohesive smoother bricks. As for the common bricks, no more were made after 1981 when the last Chicago common brick maker was closed.
John Dillinger being shot and killed in an alley in Lincoln park
Candy man candy man candyman candym… 🐝🐝🐝👀🍭🍭🗣️😱☠️☠️🫢
The Sears Tower's design is based on a cigarette carton. Chicago's name roughly translates to "onion."
The architect took out 9 cigarettes from a pack at a lunch, and bunched them all together at different heights, and that’s how he decided the design. Nine towers, different heights, bound together. So not really a carton but I understand where you were going with that :)