Chicago History | Fall 2001

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editor Emily M. Holmes Gwen Ihnat Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford

Copyright 2001 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6071 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago Historical Society’s Publications Office.

Cover: The Chicago Theatre, 1927. CHS, ICHi-10987.

C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS

TRUSTEES

M. Hill Hammock Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Vice Chair John W. Rowe Vice Chair David P. Bolger Treasurer Potter Palmer Secretary R. Eden Martin Immediate Past Chair Lonnie G. Bunch President

Philip D. Block III David R. Boles David P. Bolger Laurence Booth Lonnie G. Bunch Michelle L. Collins Kevann M. Cooke John W. Croghan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sharon Gist Gilliam M. Hill Hammock Cynthia L. Hedlund Susan Higinbotham David D. Hiller

LIFE TRUSTEES

Henry W. Howell Richard M. Jaffee Barbara Levy Kipper Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Potter Palmer John W. Rowe Beth Schroeder Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander

Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair Charles T. Brumback Stewart S. Dixon Philip W. Hummer Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss John T. McCutcheon Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Newton N. Minow Bryan S. Reid Jr. Dempsey J. Travis HONORARY TRUSTEE

Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago

The Chicago Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Historical Society’s activities.

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago History is made possible through the support of the Dr. Scholl Foundation.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Fall 2001 VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 2

Contents

5 37 23 60

Making the Mile Magnificent John W. Stamper

Chicago’s Theatre Ralph Pugh

Departments Yesterday’s City Neal Samors

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

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Making the Mile Magnificent Arthur Rubloff’s vision for Michigan Avenue changed the face of the city.

J O H N W. S TA M P E R

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t a 1947 press conference held at Chicago’s Ambassador Hotel, one of the city’s best known developers unveiled a redevelopment plan for what had once been the city’s most vital and famous commercial avenue. More than 250 people attended the event, including property owners, bankers, journalists, real estate agents, city officials, Mayor Martin Kennelly, and even Illinois Governor Richard Stratten. Large drawings and photo collages covered the walls of the room and in the center was a model of Chicago’s Near North Side. At the podium stood Arthur Rubloff, who described his revitalization proposal for the city’s preeminent shopping thoroughfare and the most prestigious office address of the 1920s: North Michigan Avenue.

Why did North Michigan Avenue, which had been so commercially successful only two decades earlier, need redeveloping? Despite the many architectural masterpieces and showy storefronts that lined its broad sidewalks, the avenue faced serious economic problems from the effects of the Great Depression and war years. Building activity in general was at a low point in the city’s history, thousands remained unemployed, and banks still had little money to lend. North Michigan Avenue had been especially hard hit during the Depression, as more than half of its property owners declared bankruptcy and most of its buildings became vacant.

Opposite: Arthur Rubloff in 1976. Above: Rubloff (right) with architect John W. Root, in 1947, beside a model of Rubloff’s vision for the redevelopment of Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue.

5

An article in the Chicago Tribune, published just three days before Rubloff’s press conference, stated that Chicago realtors agreed there was not enough demand for office space in the city to justify construction of any new office or commercial buildings. The city remained overbuilt from the economic boom of the 1920s, and due to low demand and high construction costs, the current rent levels were not high enough to make new buildings profitable.

Undaunted by this lack of optimism and bleak economic prospects, Rubloff boldly proposed a plan for the construction of new buildings; the renovation of old ones; the addition of a park, a skating rink, midblock pedestrian promenades; and a more efficient traffic and parking system. He asserted that Chicago desperately needed the North Michigan Avenue development to shake off the doldrums of the Depression and to create a building renaissance of vast proportion.

Estimating the potential retail revenue on the avenue at thirty million dollars per year, he stated: “It is my considered opinion that this announcement will lead to one of the greatest construction building booms and real estate markets that we have seen in many a decade in Chicago and will attract many quality merchants from other cities in the area.”

Dubbed the “Magnificent Mile,” Rubloff ’s project included seventeen blocks, extending northward from the river and the Michigan Avenue Bridge to Oak Street and the Drake Hotel. Rush Street bordered it on the west and St. Clair on the east. Rubloff proposed new low- to mid-rise buildings containing stores and offices for both sides of the avenue. Behind these buildings and separated by landscaped promenades, he proposed taller office and apartment buildings with streetlevel shops.

Rubloff’s plan included no skyscrapers, nor was it a Daniel Burnham–sized redesign of the entire city. This plan focused on a limited area, responding directly to the moderate scale of the surrounding buildings. It emphasized a continuous street line while still allowing sunlight to reach the sidewalks. Rubloff made no attempt to erect the tallest building in the world, no proposal for an isolated mega-building as we recently have seen so often, and no effort to redesign the entire city. Instead he presented a well-defined urban proposal for a single commercial avenue, with a concern for pedestrian traffic, quality of light and air, and the city’s character as a whole.

Left: On April 6, 1947, just three days before Rubloff’s press conference, the Chicago Tribune published an article on the lack of demand for the development of new office space in downtown Chicago. Opposite: A model of Rubloff’s “Magnificent Mile.”

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Magnificent Mile | 7

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What Rubloff’s proposal lacked, however, was architectural distinction and a strong identity. The buildings proposed by his chosen architectural firm, Holabird and Root, had an overly simplified functionalist appearance. The style was akin to the geometric and abstract modernist architecture of Ludwig Hilbersheimer and Mies van der Rohe, both of whom had begun teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1938, and were influential in bringing to Chicago the design principles of the German Bauhaus. The buildings proposed by Holabird and Root lacked the refinement and elegance of the best Mies designs, and they lacked the richness of the distinctive Art Deco, neoBaroque, and neo-Gothic buildings that defined the avenue. Holabird and Root’s buildings were influenced too heavily by an industrial aesthetic and a minimalist view of architecture and city planning, one that suffered from an insistence on wholesale demolition, geometric glass and steel buildings, lack of variety, and too few street amenities, such as benches, kiosks, and landscaping.

Rubloff and his architectural firm were not solely to blame for this emphasis on industrialism and minimalism. This tendency persisted in practically all urban design projects of the 1940s and 1950s. Such proposals often showed a disregard for the building styles and planning traditions of the region or city for which they were designed. Developers of that era did not seek to blend in with the existing architecture, nor did they try to maintain a sense of continuity, authenticity, and identity with the area. Minimalism, geometry, transparency, and structural expression were the bywords of the day.

This aesthetic sometimes led to great architectural masterpieces such as the Inland Steel Building and the Civic Center. It also led to the worst of the city’s planning and social failures, such as the Robert Taylor Homes and the original elevated walkways and surface parking lots of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.

As with any real estate project, Rubloff’s initiative required heavy doses of both financing and marketing to succeed. These two components in the hands of someone like Rubloff took on a power of almost mythical proportions. Believing that “money must be put to work in order to make money,” Rubloff and his associates aggressively acquired property along the avenue in the 1940s, financing their purchases with heavily leveraged mortgages similar to those that made development possible in the 1920s. By 1947, they had purchased or taken control of more real estate on North Michigan Avenue than any other single individual or company. Rubloff then hired Holabird and Root to produce the master plan and initiated his extensive promotional effort to make his idea successful.

Rubloff’s plan was to restore North Michigan Avenue to its former grandeur and prosperity, as illustrated in this 1920s photograph of the thoroughfare.

Magnificent Mile | 9

The result was a multimillion-dollar face-lift for the avenue, not to mention a large profit for Rubloff and his firm, Arthur Rubloff and Company. But the redevelopment of North Michigan Avenue represented much more to Rubloff. According to his longtime associate Abel Burland, the Magnificent Mile was to be Rubloff’s legacy for Chicago. For a grade school dropout who ran away from home at the age of twelve, Rubloff had lofty aspirations, and he set out to reach his goals based on his ability to sell. This time he was selling a new identity for Chicago’s most important commercial street. He was going to make the Magnificent Mile a defining element of the city’s urban character.

Rubloff began his career in Chicago as a real estate salesman in 1919. After working for several commercial firms during the 1920s, he opened his own office in 1930. He got his big break when James Simpson, former president of Marshall Field and Company, hired him to fill the office and exhibit spaces of Chicago’s giant Merchandise Mart, the largest commercial building in the world. Rubloff succeeded in doing so with a combination of tough-minded negotiating, courage, and most of all, creative advertising. With the Merchandise Mart project, he perfected his selling skills and became wellknown for his flair for promotion—not just of his business interests, but of himself as well. He spent extravagantly (mostly with borrowed money), buying the best clothes, the most beautiful houses, and the most luxurious automobiles. As he became more successful, Rubloff began thinking about how to make his permanent mark on the city.

Above: Typescript page from Rubloff’s speech at the unveiling of his $200 million plan for the redevelopment of North Michigan Avenue. Left: Rubloff earned his reputation as a tough-minded salesman with a flair for advertising after his real estate firm was hired to fill the office spaces and exhibit areas of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart in the early 1930s.

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By the time he announced his project for North Michigan Avenue, Rubloff’s firm managed 140 buildings with an annual revenue of nearly fifteen million dollars.

His clients included the Pennsylvania Railroad, Greyhound, Time, Music Corporation of America, Washington National Life Insurance Company, the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, and Carson Pirie Scott and Company. In 1942, he helped revolutionize the retail business by constructing Evergreen Plaza, one of the country’s first large-scale shopping centers designed to accommodate automobile traffic and parking. Located on Chicago’s Southwest Side, the original project encompassed thirtyseven acres and cost fifteen million dollars to build. It became a model for shopping mall construction across the United States.

Rubloff first became interested in North Michigan Avenue in 1945 when the Washington National Life Insurance Company retained him to sell a foreclosed property at the corner of Michigan and Pearson Street.

The area had depreciated almost unimaginably since the 1920s. Rubloff described the area as being 75 percent underdeveloped, with many vacant lots and old buildings. He claimed, “You could shoot a cannonball down North Michigan Avenue and not hit anyone.” Other agents had tried to sell the Washington National property but had failed due to lack of demand in the area.

Rubloff decided the only way he could succeed in selling the property would be to restore the avenue’s 1920s reputation. He thus conceived his redevelopment Rubloff’s flair for advertising extended even to himself. He invested in luxurious suits (left), homes, and automobiles. Below: Completed in 1942, Rubloff’s revolutionary Evergreen Plaza was one of the country’s first large-scale shopping malls designed to accommodate traffic and parking.

Magnificent Mile | 11

A street-widening venture in the 1910s (above) was one of the projects that would lead to the commercial success of North Michigan Avenue in the 1920s. Before these developments, North Michigan Avenue was Pine Street, a quiet, residential area. Below: The Perry H. Smith House at the corner of Pine and Huron Streets in 1887.

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plan for the entire length of North Michigan Avenue.

Recognizing the potential and the need for revitalization, he set out to make a civic contribution to the city that would serve as a catalyst for the redevelopment of the Near North Side. Rubloff’s motivation transcended mere profit; this project fulfilled his desire to be part of the city’s history in the tradition of city planners Daniel Burnham and Walter D. Moody. In Abel Burland’s words, Rubloff wanted “to be identified with the best the city could offer.”

Michigan Avenue had achieved its early commercial success thanks in large part to a street-widening project and the construction of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the Chicago River in the 1910s. Before these developments, Michigan Avenue was known as Pine Street, a quiet residential thoroughfare running from the river to just beyond Chicago Avenue—the area known as Streeterville. The only bridge over the river connected Rush Street, one block west of Pine Street. It was not until the preparation of the Chicago Plan by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett from 1906 to 1909 that the plan for the avenue took on its final form.

While the new avenue and bridge were being constructed, the North Central Business District Association (NCBDA) prepared a new master plan for the avenue.

This plan, published in 1918, spelled out goals for development within a coherent architectural setting, including proposals restricting the height of buildings to ten stories, using uniform, continuous balcony lines at the level of the second floor, and vacating the alleys that crossed the middle of each block. It also recommended the area feature office buildings, banks, hotels, and upscale shops rather than automobile showrooms, saloons, warehouses, and industrial buildings. The NCBDA hoped to influence the architectural character and use of North Michigan Avenue to ensure its development as a major commercial center.

The NCBDA proposal, one of the most comprehensive master plans ever made for a single street in Chicago, was praised by architects, developers, and property owners alike for its European-based architectural character and aim of influencing the shape of private building development. Like the Burnham Plan a decade earlier, however, it failed to anticipate a fundamental change in the economics of real estate development in Chicago, one that would revolutionize the city’s urban character. At the turn of the century, Chicago’s zoning and building codes allowed heights of only one hundred feet. By the 1920s, advances in building technology and urgings by architects and developers combined to increase this limit to 264 feet, and the city would permit the construction of a tower of unlimited height. This change not only dramatically altered the character of the original plans for Michigan Avenue, but helped pave the way for the development of high-rise construction throughout the city.

Daniel Burnham’s and Edward Bennett’s proposal (above) to connect the north and south sides of the Chicago River, c. 1910.

Andrew Rebori’s 1918 proposal (below) for North Michigan Avenue.

Magnificent Mile | 13

With the construction of high-rises such as the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, the developers of North Michigan Avenue in the 1920s broke from the uniform ten-story building plans of earlier decades.

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Private businessmen, property owners, architects, and builders produced both the Burnham and the NCBDA plans. Still, neither plan adequately envisioned how return on investment and the competing aspirations of developers and architects would lead to the construction of high-rise buildings on the avenue.

Indeed, the actual development of North Michigan Avenue during the 1920s resulted in a very different situation from that proposed by Burnham and the NCBDA, just as development in the 1960s and 1970s would follow a very different course from that suggested by Rubloff.

Instead of the uniform ten-story buildings called for in the Burnham and NCBDA proposals, skyscrapers—including the Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower, McGraw-Hill Building, Medinah Club, Allerton Hotel, and the Palmolive Building—sprang up all along the Magnificent Mile. These buildings possessed the kind of high design standards called for in the Burnham and NCBDA plans; however, they broke rather dramatically the plans’ preferred height limits and principle of continuous cornice lines.

Despite its mixture of low-, mid-, and high-rise buildings, North Michigan Avenue symbolized class and prosperity, a reputation that proved pivotal to its future development. In the 1940s, Rubloff recognized the avenue’s great potential for redevelopment. With Holabird

and Root’s plan, he returned to the original Burnham and NCBDA vision of a low- to mid-rise commercial corridor, with rows of taller buildings in adjacent blocks.

As the time for publicly unveiling his project neared, Rubloff stepped up his efforts to obtain financial backing. He estimated he would need $35 million to buy and develop key parcels of property on the avenue, and for this he needed a major investor. He approached the wealthy New York businessman William Zeckendorf, whom Rubloff described as “one of the most imaginative developers in the world.”

A college dropout who had joined the propertymanagement firm of Webb and Knapp in 1938, Zeckendorf eventually became the company’s executive vice president and accumulated a real estate empire that encompassed the entire country. Between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, Zeckendorf owned the Chrysler and Singer buildings and the St. Regis, Astor, Chatham, Commodore, Manhattan, Taft, and Drake hotels in New York. In Chicago, he owned the Sherman, Ambassador East, and Ambassador West hotels. When Rubloff approached him in 1947, Zeckendorf was in the midst of one of his greatest development projects: assembling a six-block parcel on New York’s East Side for the eventual construction of the United Nations Building.

By 1927, North Michigan Avenue had grown into a mix of low-, mid-, and high-rise structures.

Magnificent Mile | 15

Typescript pages outline Rubloff’s thorough strategy to secure press coverage of his plan.

Zeckendorf, like other real estate moguls, built his empire using influence and buying and developing property with little of his own cash and lots of borrowed money. His intent was to rent or resell buildings for enough money to pay off the debt and still have cash left over to buy more property.

Rubloff’s plan for revitalizing North Michigan Avenue keenly interested Zeckendorf. In fact, at first he set a rather remarkable condition: he wanted North Michigan Avenue renamed William Zeckendorf Avenue. Rubloff was not willing to go that far in his quest to obtain funding, so he refused the New Yorker’s involvement.

Rubloff in fact scoffed at the idea of sharing credit with anyone, preferring to be the sole person associated with the Magnificent Mile or any great achievement in which he was involved. Zeckendorf soon bowed to Rubloff’s resolve, and the two teamed up to buy property in the area, regardless of the avenue’s name.

Rubloff’s announcement of the Magnificent Mile project to the press in April 1947 was carefully planned and precisely executed. He left no stone unturned in contacting newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, and he provided a vast array of supplementary stories: a history of North Michigan Avenue, stories about the firms 16 | Chicago History | Fall 2001

planning to locate to the area, histories of the landmarks to be demolished, explanations of financing, stories on the architectural firm Holabird and Root, and of course, anecdotes about Rubloff himself. Accompanying these stories were aerial photographs, maps, pictures, drawings, and a model of the proposed development. In addition, Rubloff’s staff sent publicity packages to national magazines and newspapers such as Life, Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Forbes. Rubloff’s firm also contacted trade publications such as Architectural Forum and Architectural Record, along with real estate, construction, financing, and industrial journals and magazines.

The promotional campaign was Rubloff’s greatest strength. Promotion had always been an important tool for commercial real estate developers in the United States, and Rubloff proved to be one of its best practitioners. In this respect, he was akin to Walter Moody, the managing director and principal promoter of the Burnham Plan. Moody wrote in 1919: “Salesmanship has been to me the biggest word in the dictionary, the most positive thing in life. Through salesmanship, I hold, the world makes the greatest progress, and from years of devotion to that idea I am unable to view city planning advance from any other standpoint.”

Moody had modeled himself carefully as a civic leader, dramatizing planning and urban development as a civic enterprise for the good of the entire city, exactly the tack Rubloff took in 1947.

Rubloff’s campaign appealed to Chicagoans’ sense of civic pride and to businessmen in particular by promising to create a thriving commercial district on par with other major cities. Rubloff’s task was to convince the business and investment communities that North Michigan Avenue was a viable location for real estate development and that all those who participated would benefit.

By the time of the announcement of the Magnificent Mile project, Rubloff and Zeckendorf’s real estate firm, Webb and Knapp, had succeeded in either buying or gaining management control of a considerable amount of North Michigan Avenue property. They had purchased two blocks on the east side of Michigan Avenue between Delaware and Pearson Streets, and had commissioned Holabird and Root to design multimillion-dollar buildings for that stretch of the avenue. A plan was also in the works for the redevelopment of the northeast corner of Erie Street and Michigan Avenue, and Webb and Knapp signed a fifty-year lease with the Walgreen drugstore company for its building at the southeast corner of Michigan and Chicago Avenues. In addition, Rubloff sold the Washington National site to Bonwit Teller, for which the architectural firm of Shaw, Naess and Murphy designed a new six-story showroom.

The “Personality sketch of Mr. Rubloff with biographical material” called for in Rubloff’s “Plan for Publicity.” Promotion was one of the developer’s strengths.

Magnificent Mile | 17

Rubloff also managed property on the west side of Michigan Avenue between Erie and Huron Streets, and the Michigan Square Building between Grand Avenue and Ohio Street, which he upgraded and marketed to new tenants. Independent of Rubloff was a proposal by the Continental Hotel to build a twenty-two-stor y, fivehundred-room addition at the southeast corner of Michigan and Grand.

Like many successful developers then and now, Rubloff and Zeckendorf essentially tried to gain a monopoly.

Their control of as much North Michigan Avenue property as they could acquire shook up the existing economic status, use, and occupancy of the area. Through his extensive promotional campaign, Rubloff sought to create demand by reshaping public desire. The Magnificent Mile proposal was an aggressive action, one aimed at breaking the established market pattern and redefining it to suit Rubloff’s own goals.

According to economist George Gilder, entrepreneurship is the creation of surprises. It requires breaking the looking glass of established ideas and stepping into the realm of creation. Rubloff was a master of surprise, proposing a fantastic new vision for a street seen too long through indifferent eyes.

After the press conference, critics both ridiculed and praised Rubloff’s proposal. Many people were skeptical; some called him crazy. A few critics were even vengeful, viewing the plan as another manifestation of Rubloff’s out-of-control ego. Others teased him, as did his friend L. Duncan Lloyd. Responding to the media coverage, particularly that of the Chicago Tribune, Lloyd wrote to Rubloff, “I don’t know what the advertisement cost you in the World’s Greatest Newspaper but you are certainly to be congratulated on your undertaking.”

Others, especially those who wanted to get in on the action, made gestures of support. Walter M. Heymann, vice president of the First National Bank, wrote to Rubloff:

To gain further support from local businessmen for his proposal, Rubloff reactivated the former NCBDA, renamed the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association (GNMAA). With the help of Gordon Lang, president of Spalding and Company, and Joseph Frey, president of the Lake Shore National Bank, Rubloff set out to meet with other property owners and key real estate brokers to explain the project, to lobby the city for public improvements, and to secure passage of an ordinance restricting land use and imposing size limitations on advertising signs. The three men also sought information on the activities of similar business associations by contacting the Fifth Avenue Association in New York and the Wilshire Boulevard Merchants Association in Los Angeles. They modeled their promotional efforts after these highly successful groups to attract business capital to the area and to make the Magnificent Mile a worldrenowned center for shopping, culture, and good taste. A statement by the GNMAA best sums up its goals:

There is no doubt in my mind that you are making a great contribution to Chicago and the plan should be supported by all forward thinking citizens. You are to be commended for the intuitiveness and farsightedness, which the project demands, as well as the skillful way in which you are developing a program.

Since the “Mag Mile” is to be the world’s styleleader in every way, it must be associated in the public’s mind from the beginning with the best taste, the right people, the most fashionable events.

Operating on the upper-social levels demands that everything be planned and executed by men and

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A letter from Philip L. McDonough congratulating Rubloff on, among other things, his partnership with William Zeckendorf, who fronted the estimated $35 million to acquire a property monopoly along North Michigan Avenue.

John J. Geddes, vice president of the Continental Bank, wrote: The North Michigan Avenue development project seems exceptionally well conceived, but, as you know without my telling you, its completion is more than a one-man job and will call for painstaking perseverence in addition to initiative, and last but not least, plenty of risk capital.

It is probably too much to hope that your dream will be realized in its entirety but the idea merits the wholehearted support of everyone interested in adding to the glory of Chicago.

Left: Chicago Tribune coverage of Rubloff’s $200 million plan.

Above: A sketch of Rubloff’s North Michigan Avenue face-lift.

Magnificent Mile | 19

Above: Although developers deviated from Rubloff’s original plan, his promotional expertise and vision produced one of the defining elements in the city’s character: the Magnificent Mile. Opposite: The raised drawbridge connecting North Michigan Avenue to the Loop.

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women who know the proprieties and the right people, and have the best taste. This means that economy cannot be permitted at the price of decor in anything the “Mag Mile” does. It means that the price must be paid to do everything right.

Indeed, Rubloff’s plan for the Magnificent Mile and his extensive promotional efforts succeeded in transforming North Michigan Avenue, bringing it back to life after the Great Depression and war years. His promotional campaign resulted in a face-lift for the avenue costing in excess of two-hundred-million dollars. The finished development boasted new and remodeled buildings and increased commercial activity. This rejuvenation of the avenue paved the way for the building boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which secured once again North Michigan Avenue’s place as the city’s preeminent commercial thoroughfare.

Rubloff’s proposal, however, failed in many ways. While it admirably called for new and enhanced shopping promenades and for the construction of mid-rise buildings, neither of these recommendations was followed. No landscaped promenades were built. High-rise rather than midrise buildings were erected with ever greater frequency, as the street eventually became home to such megaliths as the John Hancock Building, Water Tower Place, and One Magnificent Mile. While there was certainly merit in Rubloff’s desire for mid-rise buildings of six to seven stories for reasons of adequate light and human scale, in the end this concept would not allow for the kind of return on investment that developers and mortgage bankers carrying out the individual building projects wanted. Rubloff’s planning failure in this area represents a persistent dilemma facing urban designers in the United States.

There is essentially no possible control of development where land value is exceedingly high and is expected to produce a significant economic return. Although Rubloff succeeded in creating new economic demand on North Michigan Avenue, this demand led to the eventual failure of some of his most cherished plans.

Though Rubloff’s master plan was not followed to the letter, at least it generated interest in the project. Thanks to his promotional expertise, the new Michigan Avenue resulted in substantial profits for many of those involved.

His vision for the Magnificent Mile made a lasting impression on generations of Chicagoans, tourists, architects, and urban planners.

Rubloff’s vision became a defining element of the city’s urban character. His project is significant because it focused not on a single building, but on an entire urban corridor and all of its social, commercial, and physical attributes. Without Rubloff’s extensive promotional campaign to sell his ideas to the city and its residents, North Michigan Avenue could have developed very differently, and might never have become the Magnificent Mile.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4, CHS, Box Lot 1985.140; 5, from the Chicago Sun-Times, June 10, 1984; 6, from Chicago Sunday Tribune, April 6, 1947; 7, CHS, HB-10099B; 8–9, CHS, DN89215; 10 top, CHS, the Arthur Rubloff Papers; 10 bottom, CHS, HB-TR-141-I; 11 left, CHS; 11 right, from Chicago Daily News, May 3, 1952; 12 top and bottom, CHS; 13 top, CHS, P&S 1959.0217; 13 bottom, from American Architect, December 11, 1918; 14, CHS, Wm. T. Barnum Collection; 15, CHS; 16–18, CHS, the Arthur Rubloff Papers; 19 left, from Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1947; 19 right, CHS, HB-10069-C; 20, CHS, ICHi-20012; 21, CHS, ICHi-04508.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more information on the early history of Michigan Avenue, see John W. Stamper’s Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Development, 1900–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Additional information on Arthur Rubloff is available from the April 1981 edition of Chicago magazine and in the Chicago Historical Society’s Research Center collection of “Arthur Rubloff Papers.” Other books of interest include: George Guilder’s The Spirit of Enterprise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) and Betsy Pegg’s Dreams, Money, and Ambition: A History of Real Estate in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Real Estate Board, 1983).

John W. Stamper is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame and author of Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Development 1900–1930.

Magnificent Mile | 21

Above: An elevated train approaches the Birchwood stop. Below: Streetcars traveling down Clark from Howard Street in 1911.

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YESTERDAY’S CITY I

Annexation and Chicago’s Northern Border Communities NEAL SAMORS

B

y the early part of the twentieth century, Chicago had reached most of its territorial borders, the result of annexation (adding incorporated and unincorporated land to the city), primarily during the 1880s and 1890s, to expand its land area. During the late-nineteenth century, Chicago exemplified how annexation could, in a relatively brief period of time, greatly increase a city’s territory and population. Chicago grew from a small frontier village with less than a hundred people in 1803 to become the nation’s second most populous city, with almost two million residents by 1900. As for land size, in 1889 alone Chicago added 133 square miles and 220,000 people by annexing the village of Hyde Park, the town of Lake, the city of Lake View, the village of Jefferson, and a portion of the town of Cicero. With 169 total square miles in 1890, Chicago was territorially the largest American city until New York City annexed Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx to Manhattan in 1898. While New York as well as Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland expanded through annexation in the nineteenth century, Chicago was, by the turn of the century, second only to New York City in territory and population.

Chicago’s principal goal was to enlarge its revenue base to respond to residents’ demands to update city services. Improvements included modernized water treatment and sewerage; telephone and electric services; expanded trolley, bus, and train lines; paving more roads; and building more schools. Overall, annexation provided the resources to meet these goals.

The original plat of Evanston, blocked out in 1853 and 1854. The town was originally named Ridgeville, and, to the founders of Northwestern University, it seemed an ideal location for a place of “sanctified learning.”

Northern Border Communities | 23

This map reveals the early property owners of Rogers Park and West Ridge.

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But Chicago’s rapid increase eventually pushed it up against some powerful suburban neighbors that were also seeking to annex surrounding communities. Some of these municipalities would become Chicago border neighborhoods, while others were able to remain independent. During the nineteenth century, Chicago’s northern suburbs of Evanston, Rogers Park, and West Ridge were only three among many communities developing around a steadily growing industrial metropolis.

While Chicago concentrated on expansion in the late 1800s, these three suburbs focused on their own growth and development and creating their own local identities.

In these outlying locations, residents sought to build communities that reflected their particular blend of social and religious values, economic interests, and political goals. As these bordering communities developed, however, they had to deal with the complex issues relating to Chicago’s expansion. Annexation was not the only challenge they faced. Other key issues included dealing with the temperance movement; the assimilation of new social, ethnic, racial, and religious groups;

supplying the range of services expected by its citizens and land developers; taking advantage of Chicago’s sprawling transportation network; determining whether or not to encourage developers to plat newly available sections of land to entice new residents; and, overall, how to establish an ongoing relationship with the growing city of Chicago. Community reactions to all of these issues helped shape decisions regarding growth and potential annexation. Although they disagreed over some key issues, including temperance and building new infrastructures, Evanston, Rogers Park, and West Ridge often had more in common with each other than with Chicago, even after two of these suburbs had been annexed by the city.

Evanston The dominant force in Evanston was Northwestern University, which was established in the 1850s.

Northwestern exerted a powerful influence over nearby Wilmette, Grosse Pointe, South Evanston, Rogers Park, and West Ridge, due to an ordinance attached to its

A view of Northwestern University from Harper’s Weekly, 1873.

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charter prohibiting the sale and use of alcoholic beverages within a four-mile radius of the university. Although in the early part of the century Evanston showed few signs that it would one day evolve into a powerful suburb, by the 1870s it had begun to develop a comprehensive political, social, and economic infrastructure centered on the prohibition of alcohol. Its citizens were determined to keep out Chicago’s liquor influence while they took advantage of the city’s modernized, regional transportation system, especially the commuter rail lines.

By 1850, enough settlers had come to the area around modern-day Evanston to incorporate a township government. This new form of Illinois government allowed smaller communities to perform basic municipal functions such as taxation, law enforcement, road building, operating schools, and conducting elections. The township—originally named Ridgeville, but renamed Evanston in 1857—included what would become Evanston, Rogers Park, and West Ridge. Ridgeville extended as far south as the village of Lake View, a suburb Chicago annexed in 1889.

The first step toward adopting the name Evanston occurred in May 1850, when a group of nine Chicagoans, representing three Methodist Episcopal churches, began looking for a location for an institution of “sanctified learning” in the Northwest Territory. They included the township’s namesake, Dr. John Evans, Reverend Matthew Simpson, Orrington Lunt, and Grant Goodrich.

These nine men secured a charter in January 1851 to establish Northwestern University and began searching for a site. They rejected Chicago because of the prohibitive cost of land and their concern with the immoral influences of the city. They decided to seek a permanent location north of Chicago near roads and potential rail lines. In July 1853, they found what they were looking for in Ridgeville on farmland owned by Dr. John H. Foster. According to historian Jeffrey Charles, Evans argued that the selection of the site, and the university’s purchase of the land, would “allow Northwestern to retain control over local 26 | Chicago History | Fall 2001

development. . . . For Evans and the trustees who supported his land policies, the school’s local real estate investments reinforced the link between an enlightened institution and a refined society, thereby contributing to the moral cultivation of the entire community.”

The founders of Evanston and Northwestern University wanted to establish a temperance policy in surrounding suburbs, a policy at odds with Chicago’s reputation for liberal alcohol consumption.

On February 14, 1855, university trustees persuaded the Illinois legislature to approve an amendment to Northwestern’s charter: the so-called four-mile limit law.

The amendment stated that “no spirituous, vinous, or fermented liquors shall be sold under license, or otherwise, within four miles of the location of said University, except for medicinal, mechanical, or sacramental purposes.”

According to Frances Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the 1855 amendment drew “a class of people who were total abstainers and who desired for their children the surroundings of sobriety” to Evanston.

The four-mile limit law also was a key issue in the affairs of Evanston’s neighboring communities, including Wilmette, Grosse Pointe, Niles Center, Rogers Park, and West Ridge. Several West Ridge saloon owners challenged the rule, taking it all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court. In John O’Leary v. The County of Cook, Henry B. Hurd, Evanston’s first village board president, a Northwestern trustee, and the university’s lawyer, claimed that “the attorney on the other side was so drunk that I had to submit his side of the case to the court as well as my own!” In 1862, the Illinois Supreme Court judged the amendment to be constitutional. On December 29, 1863, Evanston strengthened its ability to enforce laws, such as the ones related to alcohol, by incorporating as a town.

The founders of Northwestern University (clockwise from top left): John B. Evans, Grant Goodrich, John H. Foster, Orrington Lunt, and (center) Matthew Simpson.

Temperance advocates such as Frances Willard (right) applauded Evanston’s Four-Mile Limit law (left, in an 1891 map), which forbade the sale of alcohol in the vicinity of the university.

The impact of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the subsequent search for new housing by displaced Chicagoans led to a population boom in Evanston and other suburbs throughout the 1870s. Though a depression in 1873 slowed the development of housing, the boom of 1878 and ensuing prosperity once again led to dramatic movement of people to the burgeoning suburban areas. Evanston’s population increased from 4,820 in 1880 to 13,059 in 1890 to 19,259 by the end of the century.

Evanston residents sought to create a buffer between the town and nearby Chicago to protect their identity and values, including strong Christian beliefs, equality for women, and a community based on “simplicity and beauty,” and, of course, temperance. Town leaders considered annexing the communities of North Evanston

and South Evanston to unify the “Triple Villages.” In January 1873, South Evanston incorporated as a village, and North Evanston followed suit a month later, allowing them to remain free of Evanston’s taxes.

Because the town of Evanston provided superior services, offering amenities such as modernized waterworks, good roads to train stations, and a quality drainage system, however, North Evanston agreed to annexation in 1874. South Evanston followed in 1892.

As Chicago continued to expand its borders through a series of annexations in the 1880s and 1890s, city leaders considered annexing Evanston. At the same time, several Evanston residents were considering annexing Rogers Park, a suburb with many shared economic, social, and religious values. Yet, Rogers Park and West Ridge, inhabited primarily by Catholic farmers and Northern Border Communities | 27

Above: Northwestern’s University Hall in 1908. Below: The Evanston Post Office in 1906.

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Lord’s Dry Goods was among Evanston’s many prosperous businesses at the turn of the century. Here, the store is decorated for the installation of Dr. Edmund J. James as Northwestern’s president in October 1902.

a few tavern keepers just west of the ridge, were not interested in becoming part of Evanston. Instead, in April 1893, Rogers Park and West Ridge voted for annexation to Chicago.

In the spring of 1894, some Evanston and Chicago residents proposed a referendum on annexation. Overall, Evanston’s voters were hard pressed to identify any substantive benefits from annexation to Chicago. According to the Citizen’s Association of the City of Evanston, “we would gain the open saloon . . . a part of Chicago’s debt . . . the right to be governed by Chicago’s common council . . . the right to petition the Chicago common council for any public improvements desired.” Thus, on April 17, 1894, Evanston residents voted 2,155 to 642 against annexation to Chicago and clearly in favor of remaining its independent neighbor to the north.

Fifteen years later, on April 6, 1909, another referendum came up for vote. Joseph E. Paden, Evanston’s mayor, stated the case against annexation: “The city of Evanston is essentially a city of homes.

Its government has always been effective and clean and good order has always prevailed in the community . . . It would certainly be a colossal mistake in many ways if we lost our identity as a city and our individuality as a community.”

The referendum was soundly defeated, this time with more than 80 percent of the Evanston voters in opposition.

By the early 1900s, Evanston was clearly ensconced as an independent suburb on Chicago’s northern border.

The community also had a shared history of development with neighboring Rogers Park and West Ridge.

Wealthy Evanston businessmen had been instrumental in the formation of the Rogers Park Land Company; temperance had led to many heated discussions between the three suburbs; and all three communities had been a part of the Grosse Pointe precinct dating back to the 1830s.

Rogers Park and West Ridge In 1834, Phillip McGregor Rogers arrived in Chicago from Watertown, New York, following his family’s immigration from Ireland. After initially purchasing farmland north and west of what would become Clark Street at Sunnyside Avenue, Rogers moved further north, and, in 1836, bought six hundred acres for $1.25 an acre from the U.S. government. His property ran along both sides of the ridge near the site of the present day Indian Boundary Park at Lunt and Western Avenues. Rogers continued to buy land in the area, and, at the time of his death in 1856, he owned sixteen hundred acres.

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Patrick and Catherine Touhy’s home, “The Oaks.” The family, one of the area’s largest landowners, sold 225 acres to the Rogers Park Land Company, the group that laid out the neighborhood of Rogers Park.

While Rogers developed his land east and west of the ridge, other new settlers from Ireland, England, Germany, Luxembourg, and Sweden arrived in the region and purchased land around his property. When Rogers died, his sixteen hundred acres passed to his widow, his son, and his daughter Catherine, who married Patrick Leonard Touhy in 1865. Following Catherine’s brother’s death in 1869, the Touhys inherited eight hundred acres of land. That same year, Touhy platted a town site just east of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad tracks that had been built in the 1850s.

As in the other suburbs, the 1871 fire had the strongest early impact on the development of Touhy’s town. Also in 1871, the Touhys built what would become the predominant home of the area, a twenty-four room mansion near the northeast corner of present-day Chase Avenue and Clark Street, at a cost of eighteen thousand dollars. To defray the cost of his home, Touhy sold 225 acres for 30 | Chicago History | Fall 2001

between $750 and $1,000 an acre to a group of wealthy Evanston businessmen. These men formed the Rogers Park Land Company and laid out a subdivision of forty-eight blocks adjacent to the original Touhy land site bounded by Ridge, Ashland, Touhy, and Pratt. The company named the main section line after the Touhys, and Catherine retained fifty acres north of the new subdivision for their home. The land company named the east/west streets for several of its members, including Paul and George Pratt, John V. Farwell, Luther L. Greenleaf, Stephen P. Lunt, George Estes, and Charles H. Morse. In 1872, the company named the area Rogers Park in honor of Catherine’s father. It also financed improved services for those who bought lots in Rogers Park, including a small, twelve-inch tile sewer line on Touhy from Paulina Street to Lake Michigan. The economic panic of 1873, however, affected Rogers Park development as it did Evanston, resulting in few new residents coming to the area until the 1880s.

Above: Members of the Rogers Park Village Board. Below: A holiday postcard, c. 1900, features highlights of the neighborhood.

Improved transportation to and from Chicago became an important issue for Rogers Park as 90 percent of its male citizens commuted daily into Chicago. A train station was built in 1873 between Lunt and Greenleaf along Ravenswood Avenue, as the neighborhood stop on the Milwaukee Line of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. This, added to a station built earlier in 1859 near the west entrance of Calvary Cemetery on the northern boundary of John O’Leary’s farm, made Rogers Park a convenient community in which to live.

Despite Rogers Park’s enviable amenities as a suburb, by the late 1870s some of its residents were considering incorporating as a village as a means to improve municipal services. Rogers Park was similar to Evanston in that its residents were avid prohibitionists, so in addition to better infrastructure, village status would enable them to enforce prohibition more effectively. On the other hand, residents of neighboring West Ridge were concerned with defending their taverns from the control of neighboring Evanston and Rogers Park. They strengthened the influence of the St. Henry Church and school and made it clear that they wanted to be governed by other Luxembourgers and Germans. They went to court to defend the existence of their taverns on the ridge.

In 1878, just four months after Rogers Park was incorporated as a village, the village board passed an ordinance forbidding the sale of liquor within its boundaries.

Strong prohibitionist sentiment, led by the Citizens

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Many thriving businesses operated in Rogers Park. The Joseph Ebert Tavern (above, c. 1895) was located on Ridge Street. Below: Storefronts line the east side of Clark Street, south of Greenleaf Avenue, c. 1875.

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League of Rogers Park, continued in the community, influencing the village Board throughout the 1880s and 1890s. A branch of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union met monthly at the Methodist Church on Greenleaf Avenue.

The Citizens League decided to focus prohibition efforts on West Ridge taverns. Since the tavern owners did not live in Rogers Park and the inns were further than four miles from Northwestern University, the league decided to use another means to try to shut them down: the Illinois Dram Shop Act. According to Zaltman: “The key aspect of the Dram Shop Act . . . was that it forbade the sale of liquor for immediate consumption in unincorporated areas . . . since no local authority existed to regulate saloons, the Dram Shop Act made the existence of saloons in such areas illegal.” The West Ridge tavern keepers went to court, but in December 1890, they lost the case and had to pay fines under the act, prompting the residents of West Ridge to incorporate as a village in 1891.

The village of Rogers Park experienced a land boom in the 1880s, as real estate developers were attracted to the area. Following incorporation, the town built a waterworks with six miles of laid pipes, a village hall, a fire department, and schoolhouses. In July 1891, the Edison Electric Company built the Chicago and Evanston Electric Railway Company. At that same time, the Chicago, Evanston, and Southern Elevated Railway Company made plans to construct an elevated train line to run through Chicago, from Jackson Park and Englewood on the south to Rogers Park and Evanston on the north.

Once plans were underway for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, both Rogers Park and West Ridge began to seriously consider annexing to Chicago. According to one West Ridge resident, “the reason West Ridge annexed at the time that it did was that there was a regular fever to do it. . . . People did it because the World’s Fair was thought to bring prosperity to those within the city limits. They did it for the hurrah of the thing.” Some opposed annexation because of expected higher city taxes. Still others, such as some village politicians, opposed annexation, fearing the loss of their jobs.

After many heated debates on April 4, 1893, Rogers Park approved annexation. In West Ridge, the vote was much closer due to continuing concerns. After receiving assurances from the city that each neighborhood would have local control over issues such as temperance, the farmers of West Ridge approved annexation by a majority of only ten votes. In 1893, both Rogers Park and West Ridge became the northernmost border neighborhoods of the city of Chicago.

Overall, Rogers Park residents generally identified more closely on a range of social, political, and economic issues with Evanston than they did with West Ridge or

Julius Soerns (above, c. 1890) was among Rogers Park’s first mail carriers. Below: Schubert Brothers Grocery Store on Greenleaf Avenue, c. 1910.

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Above: A view of Clark Street north of Lunt Avenue, c. 1900. Below: Rogers Park School’s class of 1892.

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Andrew B. Jackson, a member of the Rogers Park Land Company, built his home on Ridge (right) in 1873. Jacksons’s home illustrates the suburban feel embraced by the residents of the neighborhood, although they eventually voted for incorporation into the city of Chicago.

Chicago. They saw themselves as living in a suburban, commuter community that favored temperance and middle-class values. Despite the fact that they had recently improved their public works and would have to pay more taxes, Rogers Park determined that Chicago’s new infrastructure would provide better services, including clean water and sewerage, good roads, modern utilities, rail and ground transportation, and quality schools. On the other hand, West Ridge residents favored annexation for social and cultural reasons, especially the expectation that Chicago would license their taverns despite the four-mile limit law. They also wanted new streets and sewers for their community.

The growth of Rogers Park and West Ridge in the nineteenth century, their annexation to Chicago in 1893, and their interrelationships with Evanston and with each other followed patterns that Chicago’s other border suburbs would repeat. These three suburbs, however, were able to create their own special identities, political views, economic development, and social policies despite the continuous impact of Chicago’s annexation movement as it spread outward to consume many of its neighbors.

Chicago’s annexation movement created both challenges to suburban authority and an opportunity for economic growth. It also helped to shape and influence new interrelationships among the suburbs around the metropolis.

Chicago reached most of its territorial limits in the early 1900s. By that time, suburbs were determined and able to remain independent, and Chicago needed to deal with its own fiscal and structural limitations in providing services to all of its new neighborhoods.

Suburban identity and its steady development in the nineteenth century became a powerful force, even against the substantial will of Chicago. Communities such as Rogers Park and West Ridge retained their identities, even after becoming Chicago neighborhoods, and suburbs such as Evanston that were determined to maintain their own special economic, social, and political visions would continue to flourish throughout the next century and beyond.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 22 top, CHS, DN-61524; 22 bottom, CHS, DN-008914; 23, illustration courtesy of the Evanston Historical Society; 24, CHS; 25, CHS, ICHi-07371; 26 top left, photograph courtesy of Northwestern University Archives; 26 top right, lower left, lower right, and center, CHS; 27 left, photograph courtesy of the Wilmette Historical Museum; 27 right, CHS, ICHi-18255; 28 top, CHS, DN-0006803; 28 bottom, CHS, DN-0004096; 29, CHS, DN-0000055; 30–35, photographs courtesy of the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society.

Neal Samors is an independent writer and consultant and coauthor of Chicago’s Far North Side: An Illustrated History of Rogers Park and West Ridge.

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36

C H I C A W G O ’ S

T H E AT R E RALPH PUGH

A broadside promoting Shirley Temple in Captain January with Radio City Music Hall’s Glee Club and Eddie Garr in 1936.

Ralph Pugh is a public historian at the Chicago Historical Society.

All images in this photo essay are courtesy of the Chicago Theatre.

hat’s in a name?

In the case of the Chicago Theatre, it suggests a history not only of itself but also of its neighborhood, Chicago’s Loop.

Today, the theater stands much as it appeared upon opening in 1921, but such timelessness has not been achieved without effort. Like the Loop, it has had to reinvent itself to stay current. In its State Street location, eighty years is a long “run” to maintain, and the Chicago Theatre has both staged and witnessed a wide variety of acts. The images that follow demonstrate the march of history both inside and outside its walls.

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The current Chicago Theatre is the sixth Loop theater to bear the name, with the first dating back to May 1838 when a small playhouse opened on South Dearborn Street. Much had changed in the intervening eighty-three years when the newest Chicago Theatre opened on October 26, 1921. In its scale and grandeur, the building demonstrated that both the movie palace and Chicago business had truly arrived on the world scene. Its owners, Chicago’s Balaban & Katz corporation, had hired the architectural firm of Rapp & Rapp to create the “Wonder Theatre of the World” and to outfit it with the best of the city’s manufactures. Marshall Field and Company provided all the drapes and furniture. The Northwestern Terra Cotta Company supplied the magnificent exterior tile.

Victor S. Pearlman Company created the crystal chandeliers and other lighting fixtures. At 164 feet wide, 106 feet deep, and 110 feet high, the Chicago Theatre originally seated 4300 people and easily accommodated the large numbers that were attracted to its mix of stage shows and motion pictures.

“The Wonder Theatre of the World” not only proclaimed that Chicago had arrived in the world but also that the world had arrived in Chicago. Though the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition had brought exotic cultures to Chicago, that ephemeral experience lasted for only six months and was now decades past. When the Chicago Theatre was planned and built in 1920–21, the city’s appetite for the world had been recently rekindled by America’s victorious participation in World War I. Parading doughboys had passed under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris before marching in subsequent victory parades down the main streets of America.

Rapp & Rapp, recognizing that State Street was Chicago’s main street, placed a victory arch in their new theater ’s State Street façade, clearly modeled on the Arc de Triomphe. Former WWI soldiers and their girlfriends, wives, and families could now pass through this arch in pursuit of peacetime entertainment. Inside, in the Grande Lobby, they would find themselves surrounded by marble, columns, and domes modeled on the Mansarts Chapel at Versailles. Lounges nearby incorporated Venetian, Egyptian, and Persian decorative themes. Inside the auditorium, the feature film was preceded by an orchestral or organ overture, followed by a vocal 38 | Chicago History | Fall 2001

Opposite: The Chicago Theatre’s “Grande Lobby,” c. 1921. The lobby was designed after the Mansarts Chapel at Versailles and decorated with Victor S. Pearlman Company crystal chandeliers and Marshall Field and Company drapes.

Above: When Balaban & Katz’s Chicago Theater opened on October 26, 1921, it announced through scale and grandeur that “both the movie palace and Chicago business had truly arrived on the world scene.” On opening night, two girls from the Balaban family wait with the crowd outside the “Wonder Theatre of the World.”

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“scenic” or a “review” (stage show), all designed to evoke a specific sense of place or mood. It was as if time stood still and all the ages, ancient to modern, were presented in beautiful tableaux.

But just as World War I, the “war to end all wars,” failed to live up to its billing, the 1920s was no more immune from the march of history than any previous decade. Talking pictures arrived in 1927, and though the stage show would coexist with the movies for some years more at the Chicago Theatre (to 1957), the equilibrium had been upset. More immediately, the stock market crash of October 1929 would shrink audiences at the Chicago Theatre. Though it recorded 3.9 million admissions in 1930, those numbers would never be seen again. For those who could still afford the ticket, the Chicago Theatre in the 1930s featured stage talent such as Rudy Vallee, Jack Benny, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Milton Berle, Gene Autry, Martha Raye, Judy Garland, Tommy Dorsey and his band, Benny Goodman and his orchestra, Bob Hope, and scores of others. During World War II, patriotic shows and motion pictures entertained patrons while tanks and military units occasionally paraded down State Street outside.

In the postwar years, stars such as Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye were able to draw large crowds to the Chicago Theatre, but the advent of commercial television accelerated the decline in attendance that the theater had been experiencing since the early 1930s. Between 1949 and 1952, the Chicago Theatre “streamlined” its facilities in an effort to rekindle public interest. In the process, it removed most of its ornate chandeliers, furniture, and many of the paintings and statuary. A false ceiling was constructed in the lobby, concealing but also preserving the 1920s architectural elements.

The 1970s presented new challenges to the Chicago Theatre as cinemas in suburban shopping centers began offering stiff competition for movie audiences. Friends of the Chicago Theatre realized that the theatre’s very survival depended on the resurrection of stage shows. In 1973, the first stage show since 1957 was a financial loss but marked a turning point nevertheless. A year later, the Chicago Theatre’s Wurlitzer organ was played in concert for the first time in twenty-five years. There then followed a decade of uneasy relations between those who wished to restore the Chicago Theatre (both architecturally and as a multipurpose entertainment complex) and its then-owners, the motion picture chain Plitt Theaters. By 1981, the Chicago Theatre had won landmark status and tensions between Plitt and the restoration activists soured.

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Above: A mid-1920s newspaper advertisement proclaiming “Little Chicago,” an experimental venture located on the top floor of the Chicago Theatre, as “the most exclusive theatre in the world.”

Left: The Chicago Theatre’s original Wurlitzer organ. For the first three decades of the theatre’s operation, the organ was used primarily to accompany stage shows and silent films, but in the late 1940s, the organ was covered to expand the stage. In the early 1970s, the organ was found, dirty but intact, and restored for use.

A 1925 entertainment guide for Chicago visitors. The Balaban & Katz Corporation rented the bottom portion to advertise the Chicago and Roosevelt Theatres.

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In December 1982, Plitt requested a demolition permit from the city; when that request was denied the company sued the city the following month. During the next sixteen months, various organizations offered proposals to save the theater but none were equal to the task. Finally, Chicago attorney Marshall Holleb met with the city’s planning department to craft a public/private partnership to save the Chicago Theatre and the adjacent Page Brothers Building. By year’s end, the city agreed to pay Plitt $2 million in lieu of damages connected with the blocked demolition request; in turn, Plitt agreed to entertain a purchase offer from Holleb’s Chicago Theatre Preservation Group (CTPG). In 1985, the sale from Plitt to CTPG was completed and renovation work began.

False ceilings were removed and crystal and bronze chandeliers were replaced or restored. Approximately 20 percent of the plaster work in the theater was restored. Wooden panels were stripped and their original art work carefully restored. The “Chicago” marquee, rusting and loaded with antiquated electrical wiring, was replaced with a state-of-the-art replica. After only eleven months, the new Chicago Theatre opened on September 10, 1986, with five performances by Frank Sinatra. The lights came up not only on “Ol’ Blue Eyes” but also on a new era in public/private cooperation in the revitalization of Chicago’s older business and residential districts.

Since its reopening in 1986, the Chicago Theatre has hosted hundreds of performances, from one-night shows by artists such as Sting, Aretha Franklin, and the Buena Vista Social Club, to the eighteen-month run of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” Today, the Chicago Theatre is managed by the Chicago Association for the Performing Arts, a nonprofit organization that brings world-class music, dance, and theatrical events to the stage of Chicago’s namesake theatre.

Stage shows continued to entertain audiences, even after the advent of “talking pictures” in the late 1920s.

Above: A Chicago Theatre stage show, c. 1930.

Opposite: Attendance at the Chicago Theatre peaked in the early ’30s. The theatre sold almost four million tickets in 1930 alone.

This document, later prepared by a historian, lists the theatre’s acts in 1930, including features from MGM, Fox, and Paramount and stages shows varying from “Flapperettes on Parade” to Will Rogers’s “Going Some.”

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Opposite: A Chicago Theatre handbill from 1933.

Right: Patrons exit the theatre after Mae West’s performance in the Belle of the 90’s in 1934.

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Opposite: An expense record of weekly shows from 1934 and 1935. Stage acts on record include the talents of Rudy Vallee and Jack Benny. “Show girls” were usually hired to support the main acts, but always at a much more modest rate of pay.

Above: During the first twenty years of the Chicago Theatre’s existence, stage shows, similar to the patriotic one shown here, often ran for a week at a time.

Below: From 1921 to 1957, the Chicago Theatre presented both stage shows and feature films. A broadside advertising the appearance of Fred Waring next to Bing Crosby’s Anything Goes illustrates the diversity of the theatre’s productions.

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During World War II, patrons attended the theatre to see patriotic shows and movies and occasionally gathered outside to watch a procession (opposite) or parade (above) along State Street.

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Above: Various stage acts from the 1940s, including singers, dancers, comedians, and magicians. Left: A song and dance stage show photographed from the orchestra pit.

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Balaban and Katz took extraordinary pride in their well-trained, top-of-the-line ushers who supposedly came from the city’s most prominent families. This 1945 flier advertises the beginning of the next show while promoting the theatre’s neatly uniformed, top-quality ushers.

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The enthusiasm of stage show performers, with shining smiles and over-emphasized gestures, dazzled audience members from the front rows all the way to the back seats of the house.

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Opposite: The Chicago Theatre’s Silver Jubilee Celebration, in honor of the theatre’s twenty-fifth anniversary, featured Danny Kaye at the head of a “jubilee review” of the theatre’s history. Above: Owner Abe Balaban (left) and entertainer Danny Kaye pose behind the cake at the theatre’s twentyfifth anniversary celebration in 1946.

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Crowd waiting outside the Chicago Theatre to see Frank Sinatra in 1947.

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Legend has it that critics Gene Siskel (left) of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert representing the Chicago Sun-Times met and began their collaboration at a Chicago Theatre screening.

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In 1985, the Chicago Theatre Preservation Group purchased the theatre from Plitt Theaters, a motion picture chain. Soon after work began to renovate and restore the theatre to its 1920s grandeur. The rusted and antiquated “Chicago” marquee was retired and replaced with an identical, state-of-the-art replica.

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MAKING HISTORY I

Philanthropists as Civic Activists: Interviews with Cindy Pritzker and Irving Harris T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

C

indy Pritzker and Irving Harris have much in common. Each have spent the bulk of their lives in Chicago and both enjoy a Jewish heritage. For over three decades, they have been among the nation’s leading philanthropists: Pritzker as a proponent of numerous Chicago educational institutions, especially the Chicago Public Library, and Harris as a passionate advocate of early childhood development programs.

Their names adorn professional schools at the University of Chicago, notably the Pritzker School of Medicine and the Irving B. Harris School for Public Policy Studies. And, they don’t have to go far to speak to one another: they reside in the same East Lake Shore Drive high-rise.

Marian “Cindy” Friend Pritzker was born in Chicago on December 15, 1923, to Judge Hugo and Sadie Cohen Friend. She has extremely fond memories of her South Side childhood. “I had the time of my life,” proclaims Pritzker. “Kenwood really was like the suburbs at that time. We lived at 4850 South Kimbark Avenue, and there were slews of children on the block. We were like a roving band, so after school, they put sawhorses on either end of the street, and we used to play baseball and all sorts of games.” For Pritzker, “it was a wonderful way to grow up.”

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The Chicago Historical Society’s 2001 Making History award recipients (left to right): Irving B. Harris, William Warfield, Cindy Pritzker, Captain James A. Lovell, and John D. Nichols.

Pritzker’s father, Judge Hugo Friend, achieved a measure of national fame when he presided over the infamous “Black Sox” trial of 1921, in which eight Chicago White Sox baseball players were charged with “throwing” the World Series of 1919. “My father was on the bench for 42 years,” remembers Pritzker. “He was a Republican, and when Franklin Roosevelt came in, there was a Democratic landslide, and a coalition ticket was formed.” The coalition resulted in Friend’s reelection to the bench.

Hugo Friend was a prominent figure but raised his children in a modest, middle-class upbringing. “When we were very young, the four of us—my siblings [and I]—went to the Lab School [the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago] until my father couldn’t afford to put all four of us in Lab,” remembers Pritzker. The family eventually moved to Hyde Park, and she graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1943.

Irving Harris was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on August 4, 1910, and was raised the eldest of three children of William and Mildred Brooks Harris.

William Harris’s life was straight out of a Horatio Alger novel. After immigrating from Lithuania at the age of one and growing up in New York’s impoverished Lower East Side, William Harris entered the business world at age 13 with a sixth-grade education. He traveled throughout the Midwest selling peacock feathers used to adorn women’s hats. His success led him into the woolen business. By the 1920s, “He was the biggest wholesale woolen jobber in the country outside New York,” claims Irving Harris. Starting with nothing, William Harris had become a millionaire.

The Harris family eventually settled in Minnesota. “I was born in what was called the Toledo Flats,” recalls Irving Harris. “By the time I was ready for school, we moved to a duplex, a two-story house. We lived on the ground floor.” Harris remembers that the neighbors upstairs were Swedish. “My good friend across the street was a German named Baumgarten. It was a mixed neighborhood.” Harris attended St. Paul Academy in his hometown before matriculating at Yale University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1931.

Despite growing up in comfortable surroundings, Harris remembers, “There was a considerable amount of anti-Semitism present all through the time I lived in St. Paul. Jews and non-Jews did not mix socially because of the preference of the non-Jews. Jews were made to feel as though they were a lower order of human beings.” Harris estimates that the Jewish population in his childhood school and neighborhood comprised about ten percent of the community. Little changed when he began college. “When I went to Yale,” Harris claims, “Yale was the same way.”

Pritzker with her siblings, c. 1937. Pictured (left to right): Suzanne, Hugo Jr., Cindy, and Robert.

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Cindy and Jay Pritzker with their first child, Nancy, in 1948.

Although Pritzker’s grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, her family was not particularly observant of Jewish religious traditions.

“Our parents felt that we should have some introduction and education to Judaism and then it was up to us,” says Pritzker. “We were members of KAM [the Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv] Temple. I was confirmed and that was about the end of my religious training.” More interesting, admits Pritzker, is the “resurgence of religion” among her children. Growing up on the North Shore, “our children weren’t particularly religious” but became more interested in Judaism upon reaching adulthood. “My daughter, Gigi, married a man who is religious and keeps a kosher home, so she had to start from scratch and really learn,” recounts Pritzker. “She’s been very good at it.”

Upon graduating from high school, Pritzker enrolled in Grinnell College in Iowa. Pritzker remembers that her father was a staunch critic of fraternities and sororities. “He thought they were nonsense,” she recalls, “and he took us to look at small schools, Carlton [in Minnesota], Oberlin [in Ohio], and Grinnell, and felt that it was a more democratic and a smaller environment after having been at Hyde Park High School, which was a very big public high school. He thought it would be a good experience for us and [was] certain we would get a good education there.” Although Pritzker left Grinnell after two years, she remained a staunch supporter of the college, serving on the board of trustees from 1971 to 1978.

Cindy Friend’s personal life changed dramatically in the summer of 1935.

“We had a summer cottage in Eagle River, Wisconsin,” she recounts, and that summer some new neighbors appeared from the North Side of Chicago. “At that time, the North Side and South Side of Chicago were like two different cities; maybe they still are when you’re growing up. But we never knew anybody from the North Side.”

The new neighbors were A. N. Pritzker and his family, including 13-yearold Jay Arthur. “The first time I met Jay, he told me he was going to college,” remembers Cindy. “I marched myself over to his house the very next day, and said, ‘Mrs. Pritzker, my name is Cindy Friend. Is your son really going to college?’

And she said, ‘Yes.’ I really didn’t believe him,” admits Pritzker in retrospect. “I was very proud of the fact that I was graduating grammar school.”

For the next several years, Jay Pritzker and Cindy Friend spent their summers together. “We sailed and we swam and we played tennis and golf— everyday, all summer long. Then when winter came, we never saw each other.” Cindy Pritzker adds, “Once a year, we would meet under the clock at 62 | Chicago History | Fall 2001

Marshall Field’s, and we would spend the day together—always with our sibs [siblings]. Then we’d go to a movie or something, and that would be the end of it until the next summer, and then, boom, we were together all-day long.”

Eventually the young couple realized their relationship was more than a summertime friendship; in 1947, they married.

Cindy Pritzker educated and raised her five children, born between 1948 and 1962, for the next three decades. The Pritzkers briefly lived in Washington, D.C.; Eugene, Oregon; and Tacoma, Washington, while Jay was busy running a lumber business. Eventually, the family moved back to the Chicago area, initially settling in Winnetka.

By then, Jay Pritzker and his brother, Robert, were well on their way to becoming two of the most successful businessmen of their generation. The Pritzkers began buying small companies when Jay was twenty-nine, first timber mills, then a small metal-goods company. In 1957, while drinking a cup of coffee at Fat Eddie’s coffee shop near the Los Angeles International Airport, he noticed that the restaurant was unusually busy and the Hyatt Von Dehn hotel (named for its then owner) in which it was located had no vacancies. The Pritzkers recognized that business executives would use hotels located near airports, so Jay made a $2.2 million offer to buy the building on a napkin. By 1998, the Hyatt Hotels Corporation had revenues of $3 billion, with 182 hotels in operation and 34 under construction.

At the same time, the Pritzkers transformed a small manufacturing company into Marmon Holdings Corporation. Usually Jay Pritzker bought a troubled company on the edge of bankruptcy, often at a discount, and then his brother turned them around. By 1991, Marmon was a diversified operation with interests in over 65 companies, including Braniff Airlines, McCall’s magazine, Levitz Furniture, Ticketmaster, and casinos in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, and Atlantic City. Marmon manufacturing companies eventually produced a wide range of products, including Hammond organs, seat belts, poultry incubators, railway boxcars, aluminum forgings, and even missiles. In 1998, Forbes magazine estimated the net worth of the Pritzker family to be $13.5 billion.

William Harris found a job in finance for his son Irving upon graduating from Yale. “He wanted me to be in business, and he didn’t want me looking for a job,” remembers Harris. He recounts that a friend of his father’s had three sons. “Each of these kids had graduated from college, and when they graduated they started looking for something to do, and they haven’t found it yet after two years,” he remembers. “My father made up his mind that wasn’t going to happen to his son.”

After World War II broke out, Harris moved to Washington and served on both the Board of Economic Warfare (1942) and the Office of Price Administration (1943) before going into the aircraft parts business from 1944 to 1946. “I always say that during the war, I did not impede the war effort,” jokes Harris. Although he was nominally in charge of importing rubber at the Board of Economic Warfare, “I didn’t have much to do,” admits Harris. “It was dull.”

Harris’s big financial break came in 1946, when he and his brother Neison assumed control of the Ran Toni Home Permanent Company. Over the next year, Harris coined the famous advertising slogan, “Which twin has the Toni?”

In retrospect, Harris modestly insists that the slogan “had very little to do with the success of the company.” Rather, testimonials in radio commercials were the key the company’s growing profits. During afternoon game shows, women contestants, when asked about their hair product, claimed they used Toni. “They were all true stories, and they were also very believable,” Harris says. “They were credible. You had to do something that women would believe instead of just having a picture.”

In September 1991, Chicago magazine printed an article on Pritzker’s commitment to the renovation the Chicago Public Library.

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The booming postwar economy after 1945 generated growing interest in Ran Toni from a variety of expanding corporations. After several companies expressed interest, the Harrises sold Toni to Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1947 for $12 million, with Harris remaining as a director at Gillette from 1948 to 1960. The sale made Harris and his brother rich. “The transaction was completed on January 1, 1948,” remembers Harris with characteristic precision, “and we moved to Chicago on that date.”

At age thirty-seven, Irving Harris was rich enough to retire and enjoy a life of luxury and ease. But, Harris is not one to rest on laurels or success. Over the next half century, Harris engaged in a variety of successful enterprises. He was chairman of the board of Harriscope Broadcasting Corporation from 1950 to 1986. He established several investment concerns, serving as president of the Harris Group from 1959 to 1976; chairman of William Harris Investors, after 1986; and chairman of the Acorn Fund, a mutual fund company he founded in 1970. From 1962 to 2000, Harris was chairman of the executive committee and director of the Pittway Company, a conglomerate based in Northbrook, Illinois, until the company was sold to Honeywell in 2000 for $2.2 billion.

In 1979, Cindy and Jay Pritzker moved back to Chicago, where Cindy became involved in a wide range of activities. She served on the Board of Directors and chaired the President’s Council at the Museum of Science and 64 | Chicago History | Fall 2001

The façade and rooftop (above) of the renovated Harold Washington Public Library in 1991. During the renovations, the original Chicago Public Library tables and chairs (below) were restored and put back into use.

Industry as well as on the Women’s Board of the Lyric Opera. Pritzker’s most noteworthy activity began in 1984, however, when Mayor Harold Washington appointed her to the Chicago Public Library Board. Five years later, she assumed the presidency of the board and served for nearly a decade. At that time, the library was in dire condition and little regarded among Chicago civic institutions; it was “virtually a homeless waif,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Cindy Pritzker changed the library’s reputation. She cofounded and served as president of the Chicago Public Library Foundation, which raises private funds for library services and programs. By 1991, Pritzker had helped raise $8 million for books and organized a $50,000 fund with Citicorp Savings of Illinois to annually purchase 4,000 to 4,500 new children’s books for the central library.

Most notably, Pritzker was instrumental in building a new central library.

She not only helped raise private money but convinced her family to donate $1 million to assist in the library’s construction. Pritzker worked extensively with Chicago architect Thomas Beeby, who was selected after a highly-publicized international competition. In 1991, the Harold Washington Library Center—the world’s largest municipal library—opened with 756,640 square feet over ten floors and seating for 2,337 readers. The building cost $145 million.

Pritzker has long viewed the public library as an underappreciated institution in Chicago. “If the Art Institute wants to raise money, people will give it in a heartbeat, because it’s the socially acceptable thing,” she insists. The same is true for the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Museum of Science and Industry, “but the library isn’t in that category at all. That’s why I like it: It’s a real hands-on place, you go through there for free, [and] it’s open to everybody.”

Numerous observers concede Pritzker was the instrumental force in building the new library. In 1998, the Sun-Times editorialized that Pritzker was “responsible for turning what was once a neglected, even pathetic, civic institution into a nationally acclaimed asset.” Many envisioned a magnificent new library, but Pritzker’s leadership in generating an international architectural competition, and the on-time and on-budget construction, turned that vision into a reality. “Chicago’s central library carries the name of former Mayor Harold Washington, as it should,” opined the Sun-Times, “but within this magnificent structure beats the heart of Cindy Pritzker.”

Illustrations of “The New Chicago Public Library” from a 1986 publicity packet.

Top: Southward view of the library from Jackson and State Streets. Above: The State Street front of the renovated library.

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Like Pritzker, Irving Harris attracted public attention because of his public generosity, not his considerable business acumen. Today he is nationally known because of his unflagging interest in early childhood development.

“I’m frequently asked the question why you’re a businessman concerned about child development, about the cycle of poverty,” remarks Harris. “The subquestion is ‘Are you some kind of a freak?’” While most will admit to the topic’s importance when pressed, and “nobody really objects to my giving money for children’s things,” Harris laments that “most people don’t care about it.”

Improving the chances of disadvantaged children across the United States is of particular concern to Harris. He was a founder and president of the Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development, from 1966 to 1983. He helped establish Family Focus in 1976 with Bernice and Bernard Weissbourd, and later served as chairman of the board from 1979 to 1985. In 1982, Harris cofounded the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a public/private partnership with the state of Illinois, to develop and monitor programs aimed at preventing family dysfunction, including child abuse and neglect; he served as its chairman from 1982 to 1996.

Harris also developed programs such as the Beethoven and Doula Projects, which continue to serve as models for the growth of training and service programs across the country. He assisted in establishing Zero to Three: The National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, whose mission is to support families, practitioners, and communities to promote the healthy development of babies and toddlers. Over the years, Harris has donated more than $11 million to the Child Study Center at the Yale University School of Medicine, which culminated in opening of the Neison and Irving Harris Building in 1999.

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Above: Harris with the faculty and graduates of the Erikson Institute. Below: The logo of Harris’s Ounce of Preservation Fund.

Perhaps the most successful of the Harris-funded programs is the Ounce of Prevention Fund, established in 1982. When Harris established a family support program near the Pittway Corporation’s factory in Aurora, Illinois, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services agreed to commit $400,000 to the program if Harris matched it. In 1984 and 1987, the state substantially raised its investment, up to $8 million annually, with the private sector contributing $2 million annually. By 1996, when Harris resigned as chairman, the fund administered forty-five prevention programs which offered home visiting, parent training, pregnancy prevention, and other support mechanisms to promote healthy family life and prevent child abuse and neglect.

For more than three decades, Harris has worked to advertise the importance of preschool education before the age of five. “In fact, setting young, at-risk children on paths of stable development during this period may be our best hope for breaking the cycle of poverty,” he insists. “Until we recognize where the problem is—long before age six—we will continue to see school failures. The problem is not just schools but school readiness.”

Harris does not blame the school system. The problem, he believes, goes beyond formal education. “There’s very little recognition still on how important the first and second year of life is.” Rhetorically, Harris insists that if you stop ten people on the street and ask them when education starts, “they’ll tell you when a kid goes to school.” But Harris quickly identifies recent research that argues that children “learn how to read based on what you teach them in the first days of life and the first weeks of life. If you don’t get a good relationship going between the mother and a child, a father and a child, when the baby is born, there’s no time after that [when] intervention turns out to be [as] successful.”

Harris’s growing realization over the past decade of the importance of early child care convinced him to create and fund the Duola Program. “A duola is a Greek word which originally meant a birth assistant,” explains Harris. “It was really a class of slaves who were trained to be birth assistants.” According to Harris, duolas “are not midwives and they don’t interfere with the doctor.

Most of them are used for lactation consultants or to help the mother while she’s in the hospital doing the labor.”

Harris at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Ounce of Prevention Fund’s Educare Center (top) and at the regional launch of Chicago Reach Out and Read in 1996 (above).

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It was no accident that Cindy Pritzker conceived of an international architecture competition for Chicago’s new library. In 1979, Cindy and Jay Pritzker established the Pritzker Architecture Prize at the urging of Carleton Smith. The prize annually honors a living architect who demonstrates not only talent, vision, and commitment but whose work significantly contributes to humanity and the built environment. Now considered the “Nobel Prize” of architecture, the award confers instant star status upon each recipient.

Architecture critic Paul Goldberger writes: “The Pritzker name is now as closely associated with distinguished architecture as the Pulitzer name is associated with distinguished journalism.”

Cindy Pritzker’s most indelible impact on Chicago may be yet to come.

Pritzker was involved in the early planning of Chicago’s Millennium Park, currently under construction along Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe Streets. The original park design followed Grant Park’s formal, classical style, in anticipation of a $30 million contribution from Chicago’s private sector. In a meeting with key planners of the park in the summer of 1998, Pritzker offered to donate $15 million if the world-renowned architect (and Pritzker Prize winner) Frank O. Gehry designed the park’s music pavilion. When Gehry accepted, interest in the park by both donors and artists skyrocketed.

Since then, esteemed artists like Anish Kapoor and Jaume Plensa, landscape architects Kathryn Gustafson and Piet Oudolf, and Chicago architect Thomas Beeby have agreed to design key elements in the project. Equally important, the planning committee currently expects to raise $130 million in private support. Professional fund-raiser James Feldstein predicts that Pritzker’s offer to attract Gehry will be remembered as “the defining moment” in the creation of Millennium Park.

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Above: Harris with a graduating class of the Chicago Doula Project. Below: Pritzker at the Pritzker Architecture Prize award ceremony in 1989.

Above: Cindy and Jay Pritzker at a recent social event. Left: Cindy Pritzker receives the Bertha HonorĂŠ Palmer History Maker Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership from Paul H. Dykstra, trustee, Chicago Historical Society, and chair, Making History Awards.

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Irving B. Harris receives the Jane Addams History Maker Award for Distinction in Social Service from Barbara Bowman of the Erikson Institute.

When asked if she considers Gehry to be the greatest-living architect, Pritzker replies “No. I think there are many good ones, but I love Frank as a person. He is so laid-back and down to earth, but he’s a wonderful architect.”

According to Pritzker, the Gehry-designed music pavilion in Millennium Park “is art.” She explains, “We want it to be an artistic statement, and who better to do it than Frank.”

Today the Pritzker name can be found throughout Chicago, including the Pritzker wing of the Art Institute, the Pritzker Legal Research Center at the Northwestern School of Law, and various buildings in the Lincoln Park Zoo. The A. N. Pritzker Youth Foundation sponsors numerous after-school programs in Chicago. Over the years, the Pritzkers have given more than $12 million to the University of Chicago alone. In 1998, the family pledged $60 million to the Illinois Institute of Technology, the alma mater of Cindy’s brother-in-law Robert Pritzker. From 1991 to 1998, they pledged $140 million to charities, museums, and cultural institutions. In Chicago philanthropy, Cindy Pritzker has been described as the “velvet fist of clout.”

The Pritzker’s influence extends beyond Chicago, as evidenced by Nancy Friend Pritzker Laboratory at Stanford University, dedicated in 1977.

Endowed with a professorship in psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, the laboratory concentrates on depression research and is named after Cindy and Jay Pritzker’s eldest daughter who died in 1972.

The University of Chicago remains one of the largest beneficiaries of Irving Harris’s philanthropy. Although he graduated from and has contributed to Yale University, Harris concedes, “I always thought later that the University of Chicago was a place I really should’ve gone.” Because of his passion for early 70 | Chicago History | Fall 2001

Pritzker with her granddaughter, Nancy, in 1990.

childcare issues, Harris’s interest gravitated toward the school of public policy. “I was on a visiting committee for what they used to call the Committee for Public Policy,” remembers Harris. “It wasn’t a school,” but a committee with “a loose organization with no capital, no endowment, and no permanent faculty.” Although the university issued ten to twenty master’s degrees in public policy annually, the program remained in a position of limbo for many years.

Harris decided the public policy program at the University of Chicago deserved sounder footing. “I thought to myself, ‘How much endowment do they need?’ If they got $5 million, it would be a lot.” So Harris called and made the offer to the chair of the university’s board of trustees. A few minutes later university president Hanna Gray telephoned.

“That would be absolutely wonderful,” proclaimed an ecstatic Gray. “We insist on calling it the Irving Harris School.”

“That would be nice,” replied Harris in characteristic understatement.

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Today the Irving B. Harris School for Public Policy Studies is devoted to facilitating interdisciplinary research and training in child and family policy, poverty and social inequality, education, and related fields. By 1998, the school was annually instructing nearly two hundred master’s and Ph.D. students for careers in public service and private sector policy analysis. That same year, Harris donated another large gift to establish the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy at the Harris School. Over the years, Harris has donated $22 million to the university, $15 million of it going to the Harris School.

Despite their many professional successes and important philanthropies, Harris and Pritzker consider their families their greatest “contributions.”

Harris speaks with pride about his three children and twelve grandchildren.

“I’m lucky I have twelve wonderful grandchildren, three very good kids. I get along fine with my kids. We all speak and that’s not bad.” When asked what she considered her “most historic” achievement, Pritzker replied, “when my grandchild Jason invited me to go with him to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in Las Vegas.”

Pritzker’s approach to philanthropy reflects her family devotion.

Philanthropy “is something that you learn at home. My mother and father were not wealthy. I learned by seeing what they did. My mother adopted an inner-city school [the Sherman School] way before it was fashionable, and she used to go over there and serve meals and wash dishes and hear the complaints of the principal.” Pritzker insists that neither her nor her husband’s parents ever discussed philanthropy. “We learned it by seeing it happen.

When you earn a position, you should give back—whether it’s in money or it’s in time or it’s both. That’s the way we were brought up.”

Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 60, CHS; 61, photograph courtesy of Cindy Pritzker; 62, photograph courtesy of Cindy Pritzker; 63, from Chicago magazine, September 1991, p.

81; 64 top and bottom, CHS, from the Harold Washington Library Center Dedication Brochure; 65 top and bottom, CHS, from “The New Chicago Public Library, 333 South State Street” informational packet; 66 top, photograph courtesy of the Harris Foundation; 66 bottom, CHS, Irving Harris Publicity Papers; 67 top and bottom, photographs courtesy of the Harris Foundation; 68 top, photograph courtesy of the Harris Foundation; 69 bottom, photograph courtesy of Cindy Pritzker; 69 top, photograph courtesy of Cindy Pritzker; 69 bottom, CHS; 70, CHS; 71, photograph courtesy of Cindy Pritzker; 72, photograph courtesy of the Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Information on Cindy Pritzker can be found in news accounts covering the building of the Harold Washington Library Center and the origins of the Pritzker Prize. The most extensive article is Marcia Froelke Coburn, “The Prize Pritzker,” Chicago, September, 1991. For Irving Harris, begin with Irving Harris, Children in Jeopardy: Can We Break the Cycle of Poverty (Yale University Press, 1996), and his articles “Starting Small, Thinking Big,” American Prospect, 7 (Sept.–Oct. 1996); and “The High Cost of Our Abortion Policy,” Chicago Tribune, 15 August 1994.

T H E 2 0 0 1 M A K I N G H I S T O R Y AWA R D S were underwritten through a generous grant from The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust. The Trust honors the memory of Elizabeth Morse (right), daughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, a nineteenthcentury Chicago industrialist and land developer. The Trust supports programs that encourage self-reliance, foster self-esteem, and promote the arts, with an emphasis on helping children, youth, and the elderly of Chicago’s disadvantaged communities.

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Elizabeth Morse