Chicago History | Fall 2003

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

Copyright 2003 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.

On the cover: Harold Washington campaigning for the Democratic primary in 1983. African American children embraced Washington as a role model, a status he took very seriously. Photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner.

Editor’s note: The summer 2003 issue of Chicago History magazine incorrectly suggested that Ramsey Lewis formed the band Earth, Wind and Fire. Maurice White founded the group. Chicago History regrets the error.

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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

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Fall 2003 VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 2

Contents

4 32 52

Inferno at the Iroquois Anthony P. Hatch

Harold Washington: The Man and The Movement Tracye A. Matthews

Monuments to Education Dale Allen Gyure

Inferno at the Iroquois In December 1903, the horrific fire at the luxurious, five-week-old Iroquois Theatre shocked Chicago.

A N T H O N Y P. H ATC H “There is nothing I can do or say. The magnitude of the thing is staggering. It is one of those events, which is so big that it stuns. . . . It seems almost impossible that so many lives could be lost in so brief a space of time under such conditions.” Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison Jr. made this statement in the wake of an unbelievable tragedy—an event so horrific that a century later it remains the worst single-building fire in United States history.

Now forgotten by many, the fire in the luxurious, fiveweek-old Iroquois Theatre eclipses the casualty count of other Chicago calamities such as the Great Chicago Fire (1871), the La Salle Hotel fire (1946), and the fire at Our Lady of the Angels school (1958). In less than thirty minutes, approximately six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death and hundreds more injured in what had been advertised as an “absolutely fireproof” building. The National Fire Protection Association listed the final death toll as 602, although no one would ever know for sure.

In many ways, the Iroquois Theatre fire reflected the laxity, permissiveness, corruption, greed, and indifference of a rapidly growing metropolis, spawned by the hubris of a city said to “be on the make for the almighty dollar.” The impressive playhouse also represented the continuation of the “entrepreneurial adrenaline [which] ran high and hard at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair . . . an auspicious breeding ground for innovation that would carry the United States through the next century as a commercial leader.”

Carter Harrison Jr.’s (top) fourth consecutive term as mayor of Chicago began in April 1903, just eight months before the Iroquois Theatre fire. He was not reelected to his fifth and final term until 1911. Above: Chicagoans hailed the Iroquois as a worthy rival to New York’s theaters and as the safest and most modern playhouse of the twentieth century.

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On November 23, 1903, the “absolutely fireproof” Iroquois Theatre opened with its inaugural performance of Mr. Blue Beard.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 5

Above: The Iroquois (later the Colonial Theatre) stood in the Loop between Dearborn and State Streets at 24–28 West Randolph Street.

Below: Architect Benjamin H. Marshall (shown at the fire investigation) publicized that he had studied all major theater fires and incorporated the most up-to-date fireproofing technology in the Iroquois.

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In 1903, some city boosters believed that the Windy City was poised to overtake New York’s stage predominance. The Wizard of Oz, the undisputed hit of 1902, debuted in Chicago, and Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland, another Chicago introduction, was hailed as the likely smash hit of 1903.

At the time, however, most interest among local theatrical circles, if not much of the city, focused on a magnificent playhouse about to open its mahogany and glass doors near the busy intersection of Randolph and Dearborn Streets in the Loop (on the site now occupied by the Oriental Theater/Ford Center for the Performing Arts). Chicago’s wunderkind architect Benjamin H. Marshall designed the startlingly beautiful Iroquois Theatre, which aimed to position Chicago as the preeminent city of the American stage. “Chicago Always Leads” boasted newspaper advertisements in the fall of 1903: “Biggest, Brightest and Best in every other way, it now has the theatre to correspond.” Chicago theater operators Will J. Davis and Harry J. Powers were listed as the theater’s resident owners and managers, but the Iroquois actually represented a $1.1 million investment by the powerful New York–based Theatrical Trust, a corporation that at the time firmly controlled most of the first-rate stages in America.

Iroquois promoters ran many advertisements in local papers, including one dubbing Mr. Blue Beard the “Greatest of Spectacular Triumphs” (above).

Comedian and local favorite Eddie Foy (left, dressed as Sister Ann, one of his Mr. Blue Beard characters) headed the cast and crew of four hundred.

Harry J. Powers (right), one of the Iroquois Theatre’s resident owners and managers, during the investigation. Powers and Will J. Davis, the theater’s other owner-manager, faced manslaughter charges stemming from the fire.

Impresarios Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger selected Mr. Blue Beard to inaugurate their Midwest flagship. The American adaptation of a glittery British import had been a hit at London’s Drury Lane Theater and drawn huge audiences in New York early in 1903.

Comedian Eddie Foy, a local favorite who began performing on Chicago street corners as a child, headed this three-act musical comedy with a cast and crew of approximately four hundred, a number not unheard of in the days before stage and theatrical unions. The show boasted a dramatic aerial ballet and huge, colorful tableau presentations featuring hundreds of chorus girls and both special effects and stage lighting, illusions then in their infancy. By all accounts, the Iroquois seemed the perfect venue for such a huge extravaganza.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 7

The Grand Promenade, the Iroquois’s magnificent fifty-three-foot-high foyer, contained gleaming marble staircases and intricate wroughtiron balustrades.

A mixture of nineteenth-century Old World elegance and twentieth-century American technology awed theatergoers entering the Randolph Street vestibule. “You must have had an Aladdin’s lamp to do all this!” a group of visitors exclaimed to one of the owners. A fifty-threefoot-high ceiling towered over a grand promenade with twin marble staircases and wrought-iron balustrades, a blend of elements based on the L’Opéra Comique in Paris and the United States Library of Congress. The structure blazed with two thousand lightbulbs, dramatically illuminating the house interior of gleaming mirrors, wall panels painted rich red, an arched ceiling of dull gold, and yards of red and green plush velvet drapery.

The innovation of the Iroquois was its sixty-threehundred-square-foot auditorium with seats arranged so that everyone, whether on the main floor, in boxes, or in the steeply cantilevered balcony and gallery, had an unbroken view of a stage second in size only to that of Chicago’s huge Municipal Auditorium. Seemingly no detail had been spared.

Backstage was equally grand, in a businesslike way.

Thirty-eight enameled brick dressing rooms were located in tiers and connected by a large electric elevator, which was used by actors not wishing to trudge the steel staircases and stagehands who needed to get the top of the huge scenery loft. For Mr. Blue Beard, the loft contained 8 | Chicago History | Fall 2003

no less than 280 painted scenery flats, which, together with the curtains, were suspended by eleven miles of two-inch greased manila rope.

In safety-conscious Chicago, where the older generation still vividly recalled the fire of 1871, architect Benjamin Marshall let it be known that he had studied every theater disaster in history to avoid mistakes in his newest creation. In the event of an emergency, he said, the Iroquois could be evacuated within five minutes if all thirty exits were used. The assertion was reinforced to audiences entering the house, who saw the words “absolutely fireproof” on the front page of each playbill.

A string of labor strikes and inclement weather postponed the theater’s opening, which was originally scheduled for the beginning of October to take advantage of the new theater season. After weeks of delay, the impatient heads of the Theatrical Trust pressured their local managers to open the doors, no matter what, to justify the costs of the theater and its equally expensive musical comedy. Therefore, unknown to the public, the managers permitted any number of egregious errors and approved cost-cutting measures, so the theater might open as quickly as possible. Chicago fire officials, some of who were unfamiliar with city ordinances, and building inspectors, who had been bribed with free tickets to look the other way, overlooked the errors and omissions.

On December 30, patrons received a copy of this playbill for the sixth week of the run of Mr. Blue Beard. An adaptation of Ben Hur, complete with a chariot race and real horses, was scheduled to be the theater’s second production.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 9

The Iroquois’s eventual grand opening in midNovember was hailed as the “event of Chicago’s century,” but the theater meant to compete with Broadway’s best was, in grim reality, a glittery illusion. An astonishing number of individuals—including the ownermanagers, building contractor, architect, house fireman, actors, stagehands, and members of the city’s building and fire departments—knew of its incomplete nature and none did anything about it. When a local fire captain, who inspected the playhouse just before it opened, warned his superior, “If a fire starts on that stage, it will be frightful,” he was silenced with the response, “What can we do about it? The [theater] owners have a fireman there, and they know all about it.”

The previous summer, Fireproof Magazine, a trade publication, pointed out some of the hazards, but the warnings went unknown or unheeded by the city’s nine newspapers and Chicago officials. The publication noted, among other things, the “absence of an intake, or stage draft shaft; the exposed reinforcement of the concrete [proscenium] arch [above the stage]; the presence of wood trim on everything; and the inadequate provision of exits.” The report, published in August while the building was still under construction, only skimmed the surface. The finished theater, generally hailed by Chicago media as a “virtual temple of beauty,” was a deadly firetrap.

Although America’s newest, most luxurious playhouse may have seemed the epitome of twentieth-century sophistication and technology, it opened without a sprinkler system, a fire-alarm box, a backstage telephone, or exit signs. Many of the exits were purposely concealed behind heavy drapery, and Marshall omitted the exit signs, because he believed they would mar the interior of his new creation. Doors were hinged to swing in, not out, and virtually all were fitted with European bolts unfamiliar to most Americans. The young ushers did not receive fire-safety training. In fact, they were instructed to lock the doors leading from the auditorium after the lights dimmed to prevent gatecrashing and to stop patrons from leaving the cheaper seats in the balcony and gallery to occupy the more expensive ones in the parquet circle. Some passageways, many of which converged with one another, were also sealed with accordion gates.

The million-dollar theater’s only fire-fighting equipment consisted of six three-dollar tubes of a popular dry chemical powder called “Kilfyre,” which, according to label instructions, controlled household chimney blazes when forcibly hurled at the base of flames. Some of these tubes hung on backstage hooks. There were no backstage water buckets or pike poles. Standpipes had not been connected, and there was an inadequate amount of backstage fire hose. The ventilation control system was incomplete; the subcontractor had left the rooftop skylights above the stage nailed shut, while those above the audience 10 | Chicago History | Fall 2003

Above: “Chicago Always Leads,” bragged this Chicago Tribune advertisement in November 1903. “No resident of Chicago imbued with the proper amount of local pride can afford to miss the dedicatory performance in the best theater on earth.” Below: In the event of an onstage fire, the asbestos curtain (swatch shown) was supposed to separate the audience from the stage and scenery loft.

To prevent patrons from moving to better seats after the start of the performance, ushers secured gates across many of the hallways, which trapped theatergoers during the fire. Officials examine one such gate (above) during the fire investigation. The theater’s unfinished ventilation system, including these skylights (below), caused a natural chimney that drew the fire into the audience.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 11

remained open. Some of the metal shutters leading to fire escapes had rusted tight. The highest escape did not have a ladder leading to the ground, and lower escape ladders led past other windows and doors. The asbestos safety curtain was a cheap, inferior product purchased to save money. Finally, the lighting system for the auditorium was controlled from a large central switchboard to the side of the stage. The architect maintained that a second control was located adjacent to the lobby box office, but no one on the theater’s staff seemed aware of its presence, possibly because it too was concealed behind drapery.

None of this was known to the opening night audience, which included some of Chicago’s most prominent citizens: John G. Shedd, who would soon head the Marshall Field’s department store and later endow the city’s aquarium; George Plamondon, a machinery manufacturer who was also an official of the Chicago Board of Education; and R. Hall McCormick of the reaper family.

While reviews of the show were generally lackluster, the Chicago Tribune acknowledged the Iroquois as “One of the Splendid Theaters of the World.” The paper’s arts critic, Amy Leslie, observed, “No theater anywhere is handsomer than the Iroquois, a noble monument to dramatic art. Except L’Opéra in Paris, no theatre I ever saw is so resplendently spirited in its architecture. . . . It is perhaps as glorious a place of amusement as Chicago shall care to demand.” The correspondent of the Clipper, a New York theatrical trade paper, neatly summed up opening night: “It is the theater [not the show] which is the talk of the town,” he wired. “The house is the most beautiful in . . . Chicago and competent judges state that few theaters in America can rival its architectural perfections, the splendor of its decorations, or its facilities for comfort.” None of the opening-night critics or reporters said a word about safety or security.

Possibly more than the uneven reviews, one of the coldest winters on record, a transit strike, and a walkout of livery drivers conspired to keep audience attendance below expectations. By late December, the Clipper published rumors that the Theatrical Trust would prematurely end the run of Mr. Blue Beard.

Christmas week, however, drew large crowds to the theater, because the show was a fantasy intended to entertain children. The matinee on Wednesday, December 30, 1903, promised further good news for the box office. Due to the school holiday recess, the house was filled beyond capacity with an audience largely made up of women and youngsters. Even Foy was impressed.

“The house was packed and many were standing,” he recalled. “I was struck by the fact that I had never seen so many women and children. Even the gallery was full.”

Extremely cold weather and a series of livery driver strikes contributed to lower-than-expected attendance for Mr. Blue Beard.

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Impresarios Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlander first selected Mr. Blue Beard for a production in New York. Based on the play’s success, they rebooked it in Chicago at the Iroquois. Above: The cover of the souvenir sheet music for Mr. Blue Beard.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 13

A sketch of the “Let Us Swear It by the Pale Moonlight” number. The star at the left marks the placement of the faulty spotlight.

That afternoon the Iroquois was not simply full, it was bursting. The theater’s official capacity was 1,602, but management had installed extra chairs in the expensive boxes, allowed people to sit and stand in the aisles, and permitted rows of standees, four deep, behind the last rows of seats. One usher estimated that as many as five hundred extra people were in the theater that day. The place was so packed that Foy, who had intended to bring his wife and children to the matinee, was forced to leave most of his family behind at the Sherman House hotel and park his six-year-old son, Bryan, on a backstage stool to watch the performance.

It was mid-afternoon, during Act Two, when the lights dimmed for the appearance of the company’s double octet performing a sweet, romantic number, “Let Us Swear It by the Pale Moonlight,” set in Blue Beard’s castle garden. Eight dashing cadets in hussar uniforms were to dance to center stage to meet eight lovely young women dressed in lacy gowns and frilly hats. As the number began and they entered from the wings on opposite sides of the large stage, the actors heard popping sounds from the single spotlight bathing the set in a pale blue “moonlight.” In the darkened auditorium, the audience heard only the music and song.

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As they danced toward the footlights one of the cadets, Frank Holland, whispered to his partner, “Don’t stop.

Something’s happening, but don’t stop singing or dancing.” Backstage, sparks from the spotlight, located on a light bridge fifteen feet above the stage floor, had ignited one of the flimsy curtains. In seconds, a thin line of orange flame spread to the drop curtains. As the music throbbed, a stagehand called out from below the bridge, “Look at that fire! Can’t you see you’re on fire up there? Put it out!”

The electrician and a flyman above him tried slapping at the flames with their bare hands. The house fireman, William Sallers, yanked three tubes of Kilfyre from their hooks, ran up a ladder to the bridge, and began tossing the powder at the spreading flames. The fire, however, was above him, and the powder was useless.

On stage, the performance continued. “We love you madly,” sang the cadets to the eight comely chorines. “So make no noise but come join the boys, on condition that the moon is shining bright.” In the orchestra pit, twentysix musicians saw what was happening. Conductor Herbert Dillea, violin in hand, ordered his men to pick up the tempo, but in less than a minute, a red glow appeared near the top of the proscenium arch. Some musicians quietly put down their instruments and made a hasty exit beneath the stage.

Rescue workers recovered the spotlight (left) that started the fire and an orchestra pit music stand (above) from the ruins of the Iroquois.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 15

Artists’ renderings of the rescue effort included these drawings of a fireman recovering the body of a little girl (above) and rescue workers moving the injured and the dead down a staircase (below).

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The song and dance continued. Children and adults in the front rows were enchanted with the “Pale Moonlight” number, and some thought the red glow was simply one of the show’s magical effects. On stage, over the music and song, Ethyl Wynn, one of the chorus girls, could just make out the faint tinkling of bells. As she danced past some other chorines, Wynn whispered words of encouragement, “The curtain will fall, the bells have rung.”

In the audience, Walter Flentye of Glenview, Illinois, was one of the first to see the fire. “The octet was singing there in the pale moonlight [when] I noticed a kind of hesitation on the part of the actors, and pretty soon I saw a few sparks begin to come down about the size of . . . a Roman candle.”

An Elgin, Illinois, physician, Lester Sackett, thought it was the most heroic thing he had even seen: “those girls remaining there with the fire dropping all around them and still dancing in an effort to quiet the audience.”

Backstage, Sallers ordered stagehands to drop the asbestos curtain but nothing happened. The man operating the curtains was new to the job and, in the growing confusion, did not know which rope operated what curtain; the stage manager could not be found. High in the wings, stagehands used wooden battens and tarpaulins to try to beat out the flames, as the fire advanced toward the scenery loft and hundreds of combustible sets.

Dense black smoke began to billow up and curl under the top of the proscenium arch, and some in the restless audience became frightened as they heard the first scattered cries of “Fire!” Sallers called for a stagehand to “pull the box,” but the theater did not have a fire alarm.

Another stagehand was ordered to run to the nearest stationhouse, Engine Company 13, whose captain had examined the theater six weeks earlier and warned of the danger, admonishing Sallers, “If this thing starts going, they will lynch you.”

Foy first heard the commotion in his dressing room.

He flung open the door, realized immediately what was happening, and rushed one flight down to the stage, calling for Bryan. Behind the scenery, members of the cast and crew were trying to get out the stage door. Foy thrust his son into the arms of a stagehand and told him to get the boy out. For a moment he hesitated, thinking to escape, but then he thought about the women and children and what would happen if the audience panicked. Foy turned and dashed on stage through the ranks of the double octet, some of whom were beginning to faint, as bedsheet-sized pieces of flaming scenery began to fall.

Half dressed in his costume as the “Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” his pigtail smoldering from the rain of burning scenery, Foy stood before the footlights at the edge of the stage and begged the audience to be calm and move out slowly. Some people momentarily retook their

seats. Foy glanced into the orchestra pit where, now, only the conductor and six musicians remained among discarded instruments and overturned music stands. “An overture Herbert, an overture,” he begged Dillea. “Keep your orchestra up, keep your music going.” The musicians struck up a tune, but few people were listening. In the parquet, petrified theatergoers moved out rapidly in a somewhat orderly fashion, but what Foy could make out in the balcony and gallery terrified him. In the upper tiers, he saw people in “a mad animal-like stampede.” Along with the shrieks and cries a sickening rumble was heard from the pit to the dome. From his box seat, Keith Pickerell of Kenosha, Wisconsin, saw it all. “Men were fighting with women,” he said. “They tore aside children to push through. . . . They fought like demons.”

The panic turned to horror. The locked doors and converging exits caused people to pile up inside the theater.

In one case, the crowd threw aside an usher who refused to unlock a door and ordered people to remain in their seats until the drop curtain came down. Some of the audience made it through smashed glass panels, but

others tripped and fell, only to be trampled and smothered by those pushing from behind. Over the screaming, Foy called for the “iron curtain” to be lowered. In fact, it finally began its descent, but twenty feet above the stage one end became hopelessly snagged on a piece of lighting equipment. In moments, it burst into flames.

At just about the same time, fleeing stagehands and members of the company forced open the big double scenery doors that exited on Couch Place behind the theater. A blast of frigid wind blew into the Iroquois, mixed with the super-heated flames, and consumed the entire scenery loft. The result was an instant, giant blowtorch, or back draft, which swirled beneath the curtain and out into the auditorium. The open ventilators above the audience created a natural chimney. A cyclonic blast of fire, smoke, and chemical fumes swirled above the orchestra seats and into the balcony and gallery, killing patrons who had remained in their seats or those trying to mob the aisles and exits. Emil Von Plachecki of Chicago, a standee in the gallery, said it felt “like breathing a hot blast from a furnace.” He survived, but his face was terribly burned.

In the early 1900s, newspapers often published sketches to depict current events. The Chicago Daily News printed these drawings after the fire. Left: In a stairway leading out of the gallery, rescue workers found bodies piled as high as the doorframe.

Right: Volunteers wrapped the victims’ bodies in blankets and carried them out of the theater.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 17

The first firefighters arrived at the Iroquois approximately fifteen minutes after the start of the fire. The narrow alley rendered their ladders useless, so they fought the fire at ground level with hoses, axes, and pike poles.

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Seconds later the ropes supporting the scenery loft gave way. Tons of burning material crashed to the stage floor with the force of a bomb, instantly knocking out the backstage switchboard and all the house lights.

With locked doors and no exit signs, people clawed their way to the fire escapes illuminated by the light of a fire that seemed to chase them. Those that made it to the highest exit discovered that there was no way down and found the crowd pressing them to the edge of the platform. Those at the lower platforms found their path to safety blocked by the smoke and flames pouring from other doors and windows. Appalled students and workmen in the Northwestern University building on the other side of the narrow alley tried to push boards across to the theater; a few audience members escaped over these makeshift bridges. From the university’s highest windows, students could spot victims struggling to get out. One student described them as “crawling things.” Aerial ladders were useless in the narrow alley, and smoke obscured the firemen’s nets.

Many victims were pushed off escape platforms or if their clothing was on fire simply jumped. Those who survived did so only because their falls were cushioned by those who had gone before them. Approximately 125 bodies were recovered that afternoon from the cobblestones of Couch Place, which soon became known as Death Alley.

Fire, police, and civilian volunteers (including journalists and clergymen) heroically ventured into the dense smoke to rescue those trapped inside the playhouse, but most of the damage was done. Beyond the stately grand promenade, inside what was described as “a burned out volcano crater,” they made sickening discoveries. Some victims were stacked as high as the doorframes, and many were missing clothing, torn off in the rush to escape. Some victims had died jumping from the gallery or balcony. Others were burned beyond recognition. One child had been decapitated. Many trampled victims no longer had any facial features. Sobbing rescue workers carried scores of dead children down the onceopulent staircases.

On Randolph Street, rows of the dead extended for hundreds of feet on both sides of the theater’s entrance, covered with blankets and sheets rushed over from nearby department stores. Neighborhood restaurants, saloons, and businesses became emergency receiving stations. As word spread throughout the city, throngs of people gathered in front of the Iroquois, at morgues, and in newspaper offices to inquire about missing friends and relatives. Despite a police line, some entered the burned theater, found the remains of loved ones, and carried them home. Hours later, other dazed victims were discovered walking aimlessly around the Loop.

Some who made it home died hours or days later from

Above: Students and workmen in the Northwestern University building opposite the theater created escape routes by running boards out their windows and across the narrow alley. Below: Coat check tags from the Iroquois Theatre. On December 30, 1903, approximately two thousand patrons, mostly women and children and five hundred more than the official capacity, filled the theater.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 19

Shortly after the fire, Chicago Daily News photographers gained access to the theater, where they documented the disaster. Above: Firemen investigate the destroyed seating area. Below: A group examines ruins inside the theater.

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Some survivors reportedly died of shock days or months later, including Miss Julia Berger (above), who according to a newspaper article (right) died eighteen months after the fire from the “lingering effects of a nervous shock incurred in making her escape.�

Inferno at the Iroquois | 21

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Left: The theater’s ornate interior sat in ruins in the wake of the deadly fire and the panic that ensued. Above: The city looked to Mayor Harrison to shoulder some of the blame for the disaster.

The mayor defended himself, asserting, “Citizens are morally as much to blame . . . as the city officials” and the “Iroquois disaster was due to fate.”

shock. Casualty figures varied widely. Of the approximately 600 who perished, at least 150 were children.

Many of the cast and crew were injured, and two members of the aerial ballet lost their lives. Foy, who suffered only superficial burns, became an international hero overnight.

The new year found Chicago festooned in black crepe and in silent shock, but not for long. As the death toll continued to rise and whole families were buried in local cemeteries, the clergy and the media, not only in Chicago but also around the world, railed against the greed, corruption, and official malfeasance that had caused the disaster. Many theaters around the United States and in Europe were closed until they could be inspected and, if necessary, retrofitted with new safety devices. One of the city’s most respected drama critics, Burns Mantle of the Inter Ocean, called the Iroquois the “grave of granite in Randolph Street” and suggested that the theater was not alone in violating local city safety ordinances. “If the Iroquois calamity was a crime,” he wrote, “then there are many thousands of criminals in Chicago. . . . Let there be investigators who will investigate. Not alone in Chicago but in every city in the United States.”

Inferno at the Iroquois | 23

In the aftermath of the fire, the city’s many newspapers, including the Chicago Journal (above), the Chicago Daily News (below), and Inter Ocean (opposite bottom), and ran dramatic front-page headlines and stories.

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Shortly after the disaster, Fire Marshal William Musham created a strict inspection policy for Chicago’s theaters. He informed his assistant fire marshals of their new responsibilities via this memo (right).

Inferno at the Iroquois | 25

Above: Survivor Emil von Plachecki received this coroner’s subpoena to testify at City Hall on January 7, 1904. Below: Plachecki, with bandages covering his burns, waiting to testify at the Iroquois investigation.

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Above: Deputy Coroner Buckley stands next to the box of testimonies and verdicts from the Iroquois investigation. Right: The Iroquois trial dragged on for many months as the attorneys for the defendants requested several changes of venue and sought other delays.

There was plenty of blame to go around. The public and press pilloried the popular Mayor Harrison, the fire chief and some of his lieutenants, the building commissioner, and the theater’s owners, architect, and building contractors. (The theater owners went so far as to accuse the victims by suggesting that had audience members remained in their seats, instead of rushing the exits, all would have survived.) After conducting an inquest and taking testimony from two hundred witnesses, some of them swathed in bandages, the city coroner declared that those found guilty would be brought to justice. That never happened.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 27

The Iroquois sustained only interior damage, so despite many protests (opposite), it reopened less than a year later as the Colonial Theatre (above). In 1926, contractors tore it down to make room for the Oriental Theater.

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The Theatrical Trust immediately hired Levy Mayer, one of Chicago’s most brilliant attorneys. Through clever and dogged investigation, Mayer discovered inconsistencies in the city’s ordinances and successfully sought legal delays, including two changes of venue away from Chicago, where he argued that his clients could not receive a fair trial. Years later, by the time the cases came before a judge and jury, the Iroquois story, and the initial fury it engendered, had long been forgotten by everyone except the victims’ families. Some of the city ordinances were determined to be invalid. No one was found guilty, no one went to jail, and no one paid a fine.

Official records of the tragedy no longer exist in the files of city’s police or fire departments or in the Cook County law library or local bar association. The Illinois Law Review, however, severely criticized the conduct of the case in a 1907 article, “Flagrant Instances of the Law’s Delays.” The article referred to the “outrageous delays caused by a lack of dispatch in the conduct of the prosecution,” Mayer’s policy of “postponing motions to quash indictments and for changes of venue, and the tardiness of judges in ruling on motions.” The Iroquois case, said the Review, “sows . . . the seed of contempt for law and gives notice to the world of the inefficiency of our judicial system.”

Regardless of the numerous lawsuits, the Iroquois Theatre was uninsured, as were many women and children in the early twentieth century, and the plaintiffs’ attorneys were often outgunned and outmanned by the Theatrical Trust’s larger law firms. In the end, only thirty of the victims’ families received any compensation whatsoever, and then it was from the construction company that built the theater.

Despite the interior devastation, the Iroquois Theatre remained standing, was completely refurbished, and became a vaudeville house in 1904 until it was demolished in the 1920s to make way for the Oriental Theater. Yet reform and innovation came out of the tragedy. Illuminated exit signs became commonplace, as did fireproof scenery, genuine asbestos curtains, and revised building codes, mandating that doors swung out, not in. An Indianapolis hardware salesman, who was to have been in the theater but missed the performance, invented what became the “panic bar,” which is still in use.

The spotlight believed to have caused the fire was retrieved and remains in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society, along with a wooden music stand and pieces of fabric from the safety curtain. Beyond this handful of objects, nothing is left of the Iroquois Theatre. Its name vanished, along with Mr. Blue Beard, which has never again been performed on any stage.

Inferno at the Iroquois | 29

After the fire, the Iroquois Memorial Association was established to support the families of victims, promote awareness, rally the community, and raise money. Right: Coroner Traeger’s receipt for his donation to the Iroquois Memorial Emergency Hospital Fund.

This collage of fragments from the disaster includes a newspaper clipping of the rescue effort and (clockwise from top) a piece of plank from the Northwestern University building, a splinter from one of the theater’s doorframes, a scrap of the Iroquois’s plush drapery, and a handful of cushioning from a theater seat.

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Charles W. Northrug (from left), Anna Belle Whitford Buchan, and Crystal Haerr McGraw at the 1949 dedication of a memorial to the victims of the fire. These three survivors were among the actors onstage when the fire broke out. (Photograph by Howard Eorvig.)

For many years after the tragedy, survivors, rescuers, and others attended a Remembrance Day ceremony each December 30 at Chicago’s City Hall. A bronze memorial to those who lost their lives is fixed on the wall of the City–County building, just inside the LaSalle Street entrance. A brief reference to the tragedy and a small photograph of the theater are located on a curbside signpost outside the Ford Center’s entrance, and a few feet away, on a pedestal, sits a bright red city fire alarm box.

Its location marks roughly where, a century ago, the stunning entrance to the Iroquois Theatre used to be.

Anthony P. Hatch, a former print and broadcast journalist, is the author of Tinder Box: The Iroquois Theatre Disaster 1903 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2003).

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4 top, CHS, DN-007343; 4 bottom, Chicago Daily News, 31 Dec. 1903; 5, CHS, Fires–Iroquois Theatre; 6 top, CHS, Iroquois Theatre Fire collection; 6 bottom, CHS, Fires–Iroquois Theatre; 7 top, collection of Anthony P. Hatch; 7 middle, Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 Nov. 1903; 7 bottom, CHS, DN-001629; 8, CHS, Fires–Iroquois Theatre; 9, CHS, ICHi-34981; 10 top, Chicago Tribune, 16 Nov. 1903; 10 bottom, CHS, acc. #1042-1H; 11 top, CHS, DN001694; 11 bottom, CHS, DN-001581; 12, Chicago Daily

News, Dec. 1903; 13–14, collection of Anthony P. Hatch; 15 left, CHS, acc. #1923.93; 15 right, CHS, acc. #1971.183; 16, collection of Anthony P. Hatch; 17, Chicago Daily News, Dec. 1903; 18, CHS, DN-001585; 19 top, Chicago Inter Ocean, 31 Dec. 1903; 19 bottom, CHS, acc. #2195; 20 top, CHS, DN001579; 20 bottom, CHS, DN-001588; 21, CHS, Iroquois Memorial Association collection; 22, CHS, Fires–Iroquois Theatre; 23, Chicago Evening American, 1 Feb. 1904; 24 top, Chicago Journal, 31 Dec. 1903; 24 bottom, Chicago Daily News, 30 Dec. 1903; 25 top, CHS, Harry A. Musham papers; 25 bottom, CHS, ICHi-31813; 26 top, CHS; 26 bottom, CHS, DN-001652; 27 left, CHS, DN-001047; 27 right, CHS; 28, CHS, ICHi-21717; 29, Chicago Inter Ocean, 17 Sept. 1904; 30 top, CHS, John E. Traeger collection; 30 bottom, acc. #1994.86; 31, CHS, Fires–Iroquois Theatre.

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | More information on

the Iroquois Theatre fire is available on Anthony Hatch’s website at www.iroquoistheatredisaster.com. For another scholar’s view, see Nat Brandt’s Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). To learn more about Eddie Foy, see Eddie Foy: A Biography of the Early Popular Stage Comedian by Armond Fields (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1999).

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Harold Washington:

The Man and The Movement T R AC Y E A . M AT T H E W S

I

n 1982, a diverse coalition of Chicagoans, led by the African American community, recruited the charismatic and politically savvy U.S. Congressman Harold Washington to run for mayor. Together they defeated Chicago’s Democratic Machine and put the city’s first African American mayor in office. Washington’s campaign as an independent Democrat stressed political reform and fairness. While the majority of white Chicagoans opposed his election, other communities enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to elect a mayor who promised to end decades of political corruption and promote racial equality.

Harold Washington lived and breathed politics. He was an intellectual, a gifted public speaker, and a shrewd political strategist with a magnetic personality and ability to connect with everyday people. He was known for his quick humor and his huge vocabulary, easily using obscure words and phrases like “scurrilous hooligans,” “ingrates,” and “patent canard.” His personal experiences with racism and segregation and his study of politics and history compelled him to work for social justice.

Washington’s first experience in Democratic Party politics was working in the Third Ward precincts with his father, Roy Washington Sr. By the time he ran for mayor of Chicago in 1983, he had served as assistant city prosecutor (Corporation Counsel) in Chicago, 1954–58; as an arbitrator for the Illinois Industrial Commission, 1960–64; Illinois State Representative, 26th District, 1965–76; Illinois State Senator, 26th District, 1976–80, and U.S. Congressman, 1st Congressional District, 1980–83. He broke from Chicago’s Democratic Machine by running against Michael Bilandic for mayor in 1977. Although Bilandic won, Washington garnered 11 percent of the vote and carried five wards, laying the groundwork for his 1983 campaign.

Propelled by the growth of the African American and Latino populations reflected in the 1980 census as well as increasing dissatisfaction with Mayor Jane Byrne, black activists took the lead in recruiting Washington and in registering new voters to elect a black mayor in 1983. Harold Washington announced his candidacy on November 10, 1982. His official campaign literature emphasized that he was “the qualified candidate,” highlighting his seventeen years of public service in elective office. As an independent reform Democrat, Washington critiqued the management of the city’s budget, pledging to eliminate the huge deficit, end patronage hiring, bring jobs to the city, and enhance neighborhood economic development. He emphasized that he would open City Hall to the public and use the talents of all racial and ethnic groups in running and rebuilding the city, stressing, “Fairness is our standard.”

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The bumper sticker on Congressman Harold Washington’s official car promotes voter registration, 1982.

Washington won a close Democratic primary with 36 percent of the vote, compared to his opponents Jane Byrne’s 34 percent and Richard M. Daley’s 30 percent.

After Washington’s victory in the primary, the racism that had been simmering emerged full-blown during the general election. As in other cities, whites were reluctant to vote for a black mayor. Race became a major factor in the general election campaign pitting Washington against white Republican Bernard Epton. While some blamed Washington’s camp for injecting race into the campaign, racism had long been a problem in Chicago, a segregated city in which blacks and other people of color had suffered decades of race and class inequity. Washington’s campaign addressed these problems directly. The Washington coalition faced an uphill battle to unite conflicting groups behind his platform and candidacy, but the challenge seemed to strengthen their determination. Washington survived racist campaign tactics, betrayal by Democratic Party leaders and members, and a shortlived write-in campaign by Jane Byrne, to be elected the forty-second mayor of the city of Chicago.

Once in office, Mayor Washington faced a major obstacle: a hostile City Council dominated by Democratic Machine regulars. Despite fierce opposition, Harold Washington achieved important reforms in city government that left a lasting legacy. Of the nearly three hundred policy recommendations compiled by Washington’s Transition Committee under the title, “Toward a prosperous, compassionate, and efficient Chicago,” the mayor accomplished almost all of them before the end of his first term in office.

Mayor Harold Washington once again faced and bested Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary in 1987, winning 54 percent of the vote. In the general election, he defeated Edward Vrdolyak and Donald Haider with 600,290 votes.

When Mayor Washington died suddenly early in his second term, the coalition held together by his charismatic leadership and political skill began to unravel.

Yet the memories of Harold Washington live on, and the reforms his administration introduced indelibly changed the face of Chicago politics. An astute administrator, he brought Chicago out of financial deficit and created more efficient management standards. He also instituted practices of fairness, inclusion, and accountability. Mayor Washington’s coalition proved that it was possible to achieve unity among different racial, class, ethnic, and religious interests to improve the quality of life for all Chicagoans.

Observers describe the fervor of the movement to elect Washington as more of a crusade than a political campaign. The images in this article tell the story of Harold Washington’s primary and general election campaigns for mayor in 1983 and convey the excitement of the movement that carried him to victory.

Tracye A. Matthews, Ph.D., is guest curator for the exhibition Harold Washington: The Man and The Movement at the Chicago Historical Society, which runs October 4, 2003–May 31, 2004.

Although he was heavily recruited by community activists, Washington remained reluctant to run for mayor in 1983, as he enjoyed his work in Congress. He told supporters that he needed a campaign fund of at least $250,000 and the registration of a minimum of fifty thousand new voters before he would agree to run. Several community groups stepped up to the challenge, including the People’s Movement for Voter Registration, People Organized for Welfare and Employment Rights (POWER), Chicago Black United Communities, Operation PUSH, the Chicago Urban League, and the Soft Sheen Products-sponsored VOTE Communities (Voice of the Ethnic Communities) campaign, whose slogan “Come Alive October 5!” (above) encouraged over 130,000 Chicagoans, mostly African Americans, to register to vote in their precincts on one day in 1982. On November 10, 1982, Washington finally announced his decision to enter the mayoral race.

Washington first ran for mayor in 1977 while still an Illinois state senator. Mayor Richard J. Daley’s sudden death in 1976 left the Democratic Machine in a weakened state and vulnerable to an independent candidate being chosen in the special election held in 1977. The Committee for a Black Mayor selected Harold Washington as their best hope for winning the mayoralty. Although Washington lost, his run for mayor represented his growing independence and clout and his direct challenge to the traditional Democratic Party.

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Congressman Harold Washington shares a laugh with journalist and community activist Lutrelle “Lu” Palmer in 1982. Palmer and his activist wife Jorja Palmer played important roles in the movement to elect an African American mayor in 1983. Through their organizations, Chicago Black United Communities (CBUC) and the Women’s Auxiliary of the Lu Palmer Foundation, they polled thousands of African Americans between 1980 and 1982 to determine which candidate had the most grassroots support.

The people’s choice was Congressman Harold Washington. The Palmers coined the phrase “We Shall See in ’83!” which became the rallying cry for the movement to elect Harold Washington mayor.

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Left and below: A 1983 rally at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC), held just two weeks before the primary, became a turning point in Washington’s campaign.

Thousands of attendees braved the cold weather to cheer their candidate. Democratic officials from across the country, including U.S. Representatives Ronald Dellums, Mervyn Dymally, and Alan Cranston from California and John Conyers Jr. from Michigan, also attended. Through most of the Democratic primary campaign, candidates Mayor Jane Byrne and State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley focused on each other, and the press virtually ignored Washington’s efforts. All that changed after the UIC rally, when they realized that Washington was a serious contender with strong support from voters as well as other politicians.

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Harold Washington’s talent for uniting disparate political factions proved key to the success of his 1983 run for mayor. His campaign consisted of two geographically and ideologically distinct centers: the official main office downtown and the unofficial South Side branch on Forty-seventh Street run by the Task Force for Black Political Empowerment.

Days before Washington announced his candidacy, Lu Palmer and others formed the task force and chose Northeastern Illinois University professors and activists Conrad Worrill (pictured above with Washington at a rally) and Robert Starks as cochairs.

The task force proved to be a decisive factor in mobilizing the grassroots movement to elect Washington, especially among lower-income African Americans and public housing residents. Washington knew he needed the overwhelming support of the grassroots and black nationalist communities, as well as middle-class blacks, business leaders, Latinos, and white liberals.

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Above: Washington supporter passing out flyers reading “We Discovered It, We Should Govern It.” Chicago Black United Communities (CBUC) and the Task Force for Black Political Empowerment drew on themes of racial and cultural pride to encourage African Americans to vote for Harold Washington. Campaign literature (such as this flyer, left) drew a connection between Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, Chicago’s first non–Native American settler, and Washington, who was campaigning to become Chicago’s first black mayor. Although DuSable did not really discover Chicago, the comparison highlighted the role of people of African descent in Chicago’s past, present, and future.

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African American children proudly display their Harold Washington poster, 1983. Washington’s candidacy generated great excitement in black communities across the city. It seemed everyone, young and old, wanted to be involved in electing the first African American mayor of Chicago.

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The number next to Harold Washington’s name on the punch card ballot for the Democratic primary was 9, so his supporters passed out palm cards like this one (left) to voters entering the polls on election day. Thousands of volunteers worked to get out the vote for Washington, doing everything from calling potential voters to giving them rides to their polling places. In addition to promoting Washington’s candidacy, the palm cards helped inform voters about the sometimes confusing election rules that had to be followed in order for their votes to be properly recorded. The Washington campaign worried about vote fraud and tampering, reminding voters to make sure an election judge initialed their ballots. When the Democratic primary votes were tallied, Washington won the party nomination with 36 percent of the 1.2 million votes cast.

Washington campaigned widely throughout the city. Enthusiastic crowds, such as this one (above), clamored to get close to the down-to-earth and very charismatic candidate. Washington’s platform focused on the themes of fairness and justice, promising to bring fiscal stability and accountability, jobs, and neighborhood development to Chicago. He challenged the integrity and state senate voting record of his Republican opponent, Bernard Epton, and reminded voters of Epton’s connection to the conservative agenda of Ronald Reagan’s national Republican Party.

Harold Washington | 39

The growing discontent with Democratic Machine politics, particularly in African American and Latino communities, but also among liberal whites, Asian Americans, lesbians and gays, and women, culminated in an unprecedented Chicago-wide coalition to elect Harold Washington mayor. The Black/Latino Alliance for Progressive Politics and other grassroots organizations facilitated cooperation between the African American and the diverse Latino communities. Successful voter registration drives and activist campaigns against Mayor Jane Byrne’s administration motivated large numbers of African Americans, lower-income residents, Latinos, and others to get involved. Washington’s candidacy energized various constituencies to form their own committees in support of his campaign, such as Latinos for Washington (opposite), Women’s Network for Washington, Labor for Washington, Artists for Washington, Jewish Support Committee for Washington (above), Educators for Washington, and others.

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Harold Washington | 41

Retired heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali made campaign stops with candidate Washington near Cabrini Green in 1983. Young people flocked around “The Greatest.”

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Right: Campaign rallies like this one attempted to reach out to African American residents of public housing on the city’s South and West Sides.

On general election day, an incredible 85 percent of registered African American voters went to the polls, and of that number, 99 percent voted for Harold Washington.

Above: Washington receives a T-shirt from a supporter during a campaign stop in Chinatown. Once elected, Mayor Washington created the city’s first Asian American Advisory Committee and numerous other commissions, allowing community activists and residents to provide input in city government.

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The 1983 general election drew the attention of media from across the country and the world largely because of the racial dynamics of the campaign. Media often called Washington the “black candidate,” neglecting to stress that he was also the anti-machine, reform candidate backed by a diverse coalition. In contrast, the press rarely officially referred to the Republican challenger, Bernard Epton, as the “white candidate,” although many of his supporters encouraged people to vote for him because of his race.

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Above: African American children embraced Harold Washington as a role model, a status Washington took very seriously. As the city’s first black mayor, he knew that the eyes of his youngest supporters would be on his every move. Although he had no children of his own, Washington was said to have a soft spot for young people and an easy manner of communicating with them.

Right: A young girl wears one of the ubiquitous blue and white “Harold Washington for Chicago” buttons. Washington supporters joked that you were not fully dressed unless you had on a Washington button, or two, or ten.

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Left and below: Puertorriqueños por Harold Washington created vibrant campaign pamphlets like this one urging Latinos to recognize the historical links between people of African descent in the U.S. and the Caribbean and highlighting Washington’s support of Latino concerns. In the 1983 primary election, over 12 percent of Latinos voted for Washington. That number jumped to more than 75 percent of a record turn-out among Chicago Latinos in the general election.

Opposite: Democratic primary candidate Washington filed his nominating petitions at the Board of Election Commissioners at the same time as Republican primary candidate, Bernard Epton, in 1982. At that time, neither knew that they would be facing each other in the 1983 general election.

Washington’s much larger stack of petitions included 1,245 pages with 25 signatures per page for a total of roughly 31,125 signatures. Epton won his party’s primary with 11,042 votes compared to Washington’s 415,050 vote total in the Democratic primary.

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Harold Washington | 47

In 1983, four out of five Chicago voters were registered Democrats. The city had not elected a Republican mayor since 1927, and, since the 1930s, the winner of the Democratic primary had always won the general election. When Washington won the Democratic primary, everything changed. High-ranking white Democrats endorsed Epton, and white voters crossed party lines to organize groups like Democrats for Epton (above). While Epton began his campaign stating that he would not make race an issue, his racially loaded slogan, “Epton, Before It’s Too Late,” further contributed to the growing divisiveness. Crowds greeted the Republican, a former state representative from Hyde Park, at his public appearances with T-shirts reading “Vote Right, Vote White” or singing “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Racist buttons and flyers appeared across the city. In the end, Harold Washington won the election with 53 percent of the nearly 1.3 million votes cast. The vast majority of white Democrats in Chicago had voted for a Republican mayoral candidate.

Right: Washington’s supporters and detractors were creative when it came to designing campaign buttons. One unofficial pro-Washington group created buttons calling themselves “Honkies for Harold.” This anti-Washington button includes no words, just a watermelon with a slash through it indicating a derogatory reference to the age-old racist stereotype exaggerating African Americans’ fondness for watermelon. Below: This storefront window display in support of Washington distinguished between his white supporters and Epton’s white supporters, whom they derisively labeled “Bigots for Bernie.”

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Above: Surrounded by press, candidate Washington casts his vote in the general election, presumably for himself.

Below: The headline on Chicago’s major African American news daily, the Chicago Defender, boldly proclaims Harold Washington’s mayoral victory with the simple phrase: “We Have Won.”

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Mayor-elect Harold Washington raises his arms in celebration as his victory is confirmed. Hundreds of his supporters had gathered at Donnelley Hall at Twentythird Street and Martin Luther King Drive to track elections results hours before Washington arrived. When Washington finally made his way through the crowd, they chanted “Harold, Harold, Harold!” Washington responded, “You want Harold?

Well, you got him!”

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Harold Washington was inaugurated as the forty-second mayor of Chicago by his old friend and judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, The Honorable Charles E. Freeman. Washington broke tradition by holding the event at Navy Pier instead of City Council chambers in order to accommodate thousands of people. Representatives of multiple religions, ethnicities, and races arrived early to participate in the historic event. The Morris Ellis Orchestra played “Oh Happy Day” and “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and the Chicago Children’s Choir led the audience in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the black national anthem. Pulitzer Prize winners Gwendolyn Brooks and Studs Terkel read poems, and a Catholic cardinal, a Greek Orthodox bishop, and a Jewish rabbi each offered prayers. But none could overshadow the rousing speech delivered by the day’s hero, Mayor Harold Washington:

“My election was the result of the greatest grassroots effort in the history of the city of Chicago.

It may have been equaled somewhere in this country, but I know not where. My election was made possible by thousands and thousands of people who demanded that the burdens of mismanagement, unfairness and inequity be lifted so that the city might be saved. . . . Most of our problems can be solved.

Some of them will take brains, and some of them will take patience, but all of them will have to be wrestled with like an alligator in the swamp.”—Mayor Harold Washington, 1st Inaugural Address, April 29, 1983 Illustration Credits: 32, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 33 top, button courtesy of the Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Archives & Collections; 33 bottom, brochure, CHS; 34, photograph © 2003 Antonio Dickey; 35 top, flyer, CHS; 35 bottom, photograph © 2003 Antonio Dickey; 36, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 37 top, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 37 bottom, flyer, CHS; 38, photograph © 2003 Antonio Dickey; 39 top, flyer, CHS; 39 bottom, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 40, photograph by Richard Gordon, CHS; 41, photograph by Thomas Favelli, CHS; 42 top, photograph © 2003 Antonio Dickey; 42 bottom, photograph by Thomas Favelli, CHS; 43 top, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 43 bottom, photograph © 2003 Antonio Dickey; 44, photograph by Richard Gordon, CHS; 45 top, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 45 bottom, photograph © 2003 Antonio Dickey; 46, flyer front and back, courtesy of the Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Archives & Collections; 47, photograph © 2003 Antonio Dickey; 48 top, photograph by Richard Gordon, CHS: 48 bottom, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 48 buttons, CHS; 49 top, photograph by Richard Gordon, CHS; 49 bottom, photograph by Allan Koss; 50, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner; 51, photograph © 2003 Marc PoKempner.

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Monuments to Education High school architecture in the Progressive Era reflected secondary education’s changing role in American society.

DA L E A L L E N GY U R E

T

he city of Chicago boasts several monumental high school buildings. Many of these buildings became part of the city’s landscape during the Progressive Era, around 1890 through 1920, mere decades after most educational buildings resembled slightly larger versions of the little red schoolhouse. The Chicago high school at this time was struggling to define itself, resulting in changes in classes, curricula, and ultimately even the school buildings themselves. The transformed educational and architectural elements of the high school presented the new face of modern education.

American secondary education overall transformed radically during the Progressive Era. The public high school, which had its roots in the early nineteenth century as an elite academy for future college students, businessmen, and ministers, evolved into what one superintendent of Chicago’s schools called “the citizen’s college,” an institution devoted to training students of all backgrounds and social classes. This change in the high school’s purpose included a concurrent revision in the curriculum. In addition to college preparatory courses of humanities and classical languages, such as Greek and Latin, schools offered classes that catered to non– college-bound students, such as machine shop, cooking, and secretarial and business courses.

The new curricula led to modifications in school buildings. As existing schoolhouses proved inadequate, educators and architects created high school buildings with impressive façades and a variety of unprecedented interior spaces. The new buildings served two key functions: they were adapted to the expanded curriculum and their imposing architectural presence symbolized secondary education’s growing importance in American society and the relationship between architecture and education.

The Chicago public school system was created in the 1830s. The city did not open its first high school until 1856, although various administrators had been calling for one since the mid-1840s. Chicago High School stood at Monroe and Halsted Streets, near the western edge of the city’s center. Grammar school graduates over the age of twelve who passed entrance examinations in reading, writing, spelling, grammar, geography, arithmetic, and United States history could choose from a course of studies in three departments—classical, English, and normal (teacher training). The school building, a threestory stone and brick construction in a faintly neoGothic style, consisted of three floors arranged almost identically, with four small rooms around a central stairwell. On the top floor, the partition between two rooms was removed to form a combination assembly hall, lecture room, or study hall.

Chicago High School welcomed its first class of 114 students in the fall of 1856. Each year, the originally spacious accommodations became strained, as the high school proved more popular than its creators imagined.

The high school building was intended to hold four hundred students; within a decade, it was filled to capacity.

The city council refused to allocate funds to expand the school, so the Board of Education implemented a system of branch high schools in different areas of the city. In 1869, the board established two-year high school courses for students in the city’s North, South, and West Divisions inside preexisting grammar schools. Shortly thereafter, the board built a two-story wooden school next to the high school to handle overflow students.

At the beginning of the twentieth centur y, Chicago high schools stood as impressive monuments to education. Opposite: Architect William B. Mundie’s Wendell Phillips High School, built in 1904.

Monuments to Education | 53

The original Chicago High School (1856), the city’s first high school (below), was followed by four larger division schools in the 1880s, including West Division High School (above).

After Chicago’s catastrophic fire in 1871, the County Court and Recorder of Deeds used the school as emergency quarters for a few months. Many students who relocated to branch schools during this time failed to 54 | Chicago History | Fall 2003

return when Chicago High reopened for classes. They opted instead to attend one of the three newly opened division high schools. By 1880, the Chicago High School building ceased to function as a school.

Meanwhile, rising enrollments at the branch high schools led the Board of Education to construct a series of new buildings. The branch schools received full high school status (with four-year programs) in 1880, and the city’s 1,236 high school students in 1881 grew to 3,527 by 1890. To meet this increased demand, four schoolhouses were constructed between 1880 and 1889. The buildings designed for West Division High School (by architect Augustus Bauer, 1880), North Division High School (Julius Ender, 1883), and South Division High School (James R. Willett, 1884), resembled each other architecturally: unembellished four-story brick blocks with nearly identical rooms laid out around internal corridors. Although the first three division schools consisted mostly of classrooms, each building contained an expansion of facilities beyond the old Chicago High School.

High school buildings expanded to meet the needs of the new curricula. South Division High School (above), built in 1884, included a teachers’ room, a laboratory, and an assembly hall, while North-West Division High School (below), built in 1889, contained a gymnasium, a drawing room, and four recitation rooms.

The West Division schoolhouse added a principal’s office on the second floor above the entrance. North Division High School included three “teacher’s dressing rooms,” two recitation rooms, a small library, an “apparatus” room, a laboratory, and a small assembly hall on the top floor. South Division had more classrooms and closets than its predecessors, a teachers’ room, a laboratory, a special “German Class Room,” and a fourth floor devoted entirely to an assembly hall.

The North and South Division schoolhouses were built with an eye toward future expansion and initially were far larger than they needed to be (elementary classes utilized the extra space at first). West Division had the opposite problem. By 1886—only six years after its opening—West Division was so overcrowded that a new four-story, twenty-four-room building for a thousand students was erected at Ogden Avenue and Congress Street. This second West Division school was much grander than its predecessors. Board of Education architect John J. Flanders used closely spaced banks of windows, central

and end projections, oriel windows, Flemish gables, belfries, and a sharply pitched roof to give the building a strong picturesque profile. The floor plan also differed from the previous schools. In addition to the many classrooms, West Division included a tiny recitation room on each of the first through third floors, a lecture room and laboratory on the third floor, and an assembly hall that occupied the entire fourth floor.

Monuments to Education | 55

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Changes in the school curricula led to more trade-based classes.

Left: Wendell Phillips high school students, c. 1919. Above: Four Lane Tech students study a piece of machinery during a summer school course in 1928.

The last division school built in Chicago was the North-West Division High School (designed by Charles Rudolph, 1889) at Claremont and Potomac Avenues.

North-West Division’s exterior lacked the grandeur of West Division High School, relying instead on multicolored stone and brick, rounded corners, and multiple gables for visual effect rather than fancy ornamentation.

The floor plan, however, revealed the latest developments in school architecture, with the larger building containing a much wider variety of rooms than the other schools offered. Additions included a gymnasium (the first ever in a Chicago high school); boys’ and girls’ dressing rooms; biology, physics, and chemistry laboratories; four recitation rooms; a large lecture room; a drawing room; and an assembly room.

The Division High Schools demonstrated an increasing architectural maturation in the short span of a decade.

The facades of each successive building reflected a trend toward more visual complexity and historical references, but the major changes were inside. The first West Division building contained classrooms and little else; ten years later the North-West Division school included the varied spaces required to service an expanded curriculum.

Changes in the educational system at both the administrative and curricular levels stimulated the architectural transformation in Chicago and around the country.

Between 1890 and 1920, myriad reform movements altered education’s purpose and subject matter. The most notable curricular revisions included an expanded course of study and the addition of manual and vocational training programs. These changes significantly impacted the design of school buildings. Evolving educational programs forced school designers to find ways to accommodate new spaces in high schools, such as wood, metal, Monuments to Education | 57

Auditoriums, such as this one in James Bowen High School, c. 1907, gradually became more prevalent in Chicago-area high schools.

and print shops; model kitchens; sewing rooms; swimming pools; gymnasiums; and auditoriums. Architects also needed to enlarge the schoolhouse to accommodate more students, as a mixture of compulsory education laws, stricter child labor regulations, increased immigration, and greater societal interest in education produced an incredible upsurge in high school enrollments. In 1890, fewer than 4 percent of Americans between the ages of fourteen and seventeen attended high school; the figure swelled to more than 28 percent by 1920, representing an increase from 203,000 to 2,200,000 students.

Since many of these children had neither the inclination nor the resources to attend college, educators reevaluated the traditional high school curriculum.

At the turn of the century, a new conception of American youth set adolescents apart from (and considered them not quite ready for) the adult world. In the 58 | Chicago History | Fall 2003

nineteenth century, society typically viewed children as small adults. Many children worked part- or full-time on farms, in shops, or in the growing number of manufacturing plants. The United States Census Bureau reported that 765,000 children (between the ages of ten and fifteen) were “gainfully employed” in 1870 (13 percent of the population for that age group); that figure reached more than one million by 1920, though the estimated statistics probably underrepresent the actual numbers.

Such statistics appalled progressive reformers and spurred a campaign to get more children out of the workplace and into school. Educators realized the dangers of child labor as well. The Chicago Board of Education’s annual report for 1864 for example, contained the lament: “Many a child has been sacrificed mentally and morally as well as physically to the pecuniary interest of the parent.”

Children standing in line for work permits, 1911. The eventual implementation of child-labor laws led to an increase in the number of children enrolled in school.

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The Chicago Manual Training School opened in 1886 at Twelfth Street and Michigan Boulevard and was soon followed by six similar vocational schools.

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Beginning in the late nineteenth century, lawmakers passed child-labor laws that first reduced and then restricted the hours children were allowed to work. This legislation often went hand-in-hand with compulsory education laws that required children to spend certain amounts of time each year in school. The Illinois General Assembly passed its first compulsory education legislation in 1883, requiring all children ages eight to fourteen to attend school at least twelve weeks in a one-year period, unless excused by the Board of Education. In 1891, Illinois adopted its first child-labor legislation, prohibiting employment of any child under thirteen (who was not working to support an elderly or disabled relative). Nonetheless, the laws were rarely enforced and thousands of children worked in businesses across the state, especially in the Chicago area.

The combination of compulsory attendance and childlabor restrictions eventually began to increase public school enrollments across the country. Chicago’s high school population rose from 1,236 in 1881 to 2,559 in 1907 to 25,322 in 1915, and 66,932 in 1926. This population included many students who had no academic inclinations and would not have attended school in previous generations. Public-school administrators, particularly at the high school level, faced the novel problem of how to educate these children. Educators soon recognized the inadequacies of the traditional high school curriculum.

For most of the nineteenth century, American public high schools were elite institutions that offered a traditional humanities-oriented education. High school students (a very small proportion of all students) typically were a privileged group of middle- to upper-class youth whose parents could afford to keep them out of the workplace. Their academically oriented high school courses leaned heavily toward classical fields of study such as Latin and Greek, algebra and geometry, history, and sciences, such as geography and botany. The curriculum’s goal was two-pronged: to train the mind to think and to strengthen moral character. According to advocates, this centuries-old “mental discipline” approach provided the properly trained mind with the ability to easily adapt itself to any future endeavor. The educational philosophy at this time considered broad factual knowledge and sharp reasoning ability, which all cultured people were expected to possess, more important than preparation for a specific vocation. A Chicago school superintendent summarized this attitude in 1860 when he wrote, “The highest and most important object of intellectual education is mental discipline, or the power of using the mind to the best advantage. . . . It is this alone that can strengthen and [i]nvigorate the noble faculties with which we are endowed.”

During the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Board of Education vacillated between a uni-

form, classically inspired course and a set of multiple courses that catered to the needs of non–college-bound students. In 1884, the Board of Education took the drastic step of abolishing Greek from the high school curriculum, which effectively terminated the schools’ ability to prepare students for college. Education essentially became a general training for life rather than for higher education. The college-preparatory course returned in 1891, along with the addition of a three-year teacher-training curriculum.

Five years later, in 1896, the Board of Education reinstated a uniform four-year curriculum for all the city’s high schools. The addition of electives in 1900 added variety to the curriculum. Following an accordionlike pattern, the Chicago board constricted the high school course again in 1905, eliminating most elective courses, then loosened it in 1910 with the introduction of nine separate, vocationally oriented high school curricula: general, English, science, foreign language, business, builders, manual training, household arts, and architecture. These courses continued to be offered, with only slight modifications, through the 1930s.

Chicago illustrated the national trend that led American educators to develop curricula emphasizing vocational training over humanities-based learning by the 1910s. Practical training for adult life became the high school’s essential purpose. Secondary education now focused on creating a well-rounded adult citizen rather than training the mind and expanding its powers.

The growth of manual and vocational training programs typified the new, differentiated curriculum. The development of vocationalism dominated American secondary education between 1890 and 1920. Chicago responded by forming a dual system of public education, with manual and vocational training programs in separate schools. The first Chicago Manual Training School (designed by S. S. Beman) opened in 1886, followed by six similar high schools between 1903 and 1919. The city’s leading businessmen, like many throughout the United States, supported the programs, because they perceived a lack of skilled workers. Educators attempted to frame this support in educational rather than economic terms to avoid criticism that the schools would become publicly subsidized training programs for American industry.

Vocational programs for girls centered on domestic science, and commercial studies rose alongside the development of manual training for boys. Although girls made up the bulk of America’s public high school population until the 1920s, they lacked status in the malecentered educational community that considered their leadership and reasoning abilities inferior. Such beliefs helped form the basis for the new vocational curricula.

Domestic science and commercial courses taught girls to be efficient homemakers or competent secretaries, Monuments to Education | 61

Vocational high schools soon began to reach girls as well as boys. Above: Young women study hat-making (c. 1940) at Lucy Flower Technical School, which opened in 1911.

maids, cooks, or seamstresses. The increasing number of women in the workplace also affected the curriculum, as the number of female workers in manufacturing, mechanical, and clerical jobs went up almost 200 percent between 1890 and 1910. In preparation for these roles, high school girls studied sewing, laundering, cooking, typing, stenography, and bookkeeping.

Some of these courses required new types of architectural space. Many early–twentieth-century high schools began to include fully operational kitchens, model dining rooms and bedrooms, and mock offices. Whereas the Chicago Division high schools had no specialized rooms for “girls training,” Senn High School (constructed in 1912 and designed by A. F. Hussander) contained two household arts rooms; a laundry; model dining, living, and bedrooms; and rooms for bookkeeping, typewriting, stenography, textile arts, and sewing. Some cities even opened separate girls’ vocational schools, such as Chicago’s Lucy Flower Technical High School for Girls (established in 1911), which started in the old South Division building, then moved to a grammar school in 1915.

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The American high school curriculum also shifted from equality to differentiation between 1890 and 1920.

The traditional academic curriculum, which offered a limited course of study and emphasized training students to think, tended to treat all students more or less equally. The “new” curriculum, with its multiple courses of study, intended to better prepare students for their future life tasks based on their abilities and interests.

This shift materialized in physical space inside the schoolhouse. The old Division school–type floor plan dominated by identically sized classrooms gave way to plans with specialized spaces designed to accommodate a broad range of subjects. School architects no longer stacked duplicate four- or six-room floor plans on top of each other to create a high school; they now needed to design spaces for laboratories, domestic sciences, art and mechanical drawing, and shops.

Pedagogy had a minimal effect on school architecture before the Progressive Era. Despite the efforts of educational reformers, the methods used to teach the nation’s youth remained virtually unchanged. In schools around the country, students sat facing the teacher in orderly

In high school, girls learned occupational trades as well as homemaking skills. Above: Students at Carter Harrison Technical High School in a business course.

rows of desks bolted to the floor. They raised their hands to answer questions and stood while speaking. Students in each grade studied the same texts at the same speed; they either learned or were left behind. In this strict environment, the main vehicle of instruction, as it had been in the mid-nineteenth century, was recitation, designed to develop the “mind muscle” through memorization.

Students committed long poems, multiplication tables, historic events, and geographical locations from textbooks to memory, then recited them before the class.

Teachers controlled the recitation process with a steady stream of questions. A 1907 study of New York City teachers found that they asked an average of two to three questions each minute.

The type of passive education encouraged by the “mental discipline” approach required only lighting and ventilation concepts from school architects. Classrooms needed to be large enough for the students and their neatly lined desks, with a platform for the teacher’s desk, blackboards, a storage cabinet, and a wardrobe for students’ coats and belongings. Since almost all subjects were taught in the same manner, the schoolhouse rooms

rarely varied. Architects merely calculated the number of rooms necessary for the projected enrollment and added stairways and small corridors for circulation and a small assembly hall.

The next generation of high school buildings began to take shape in the 1890s as Chicago and other cities responded to the American high school’s curriculum transformation. Architects paid more attention to the curriculum than in previous decades. Curriculum expansion created more varied courses of study, which in turn necessitated new and different spaces within the schoolhouse.

As secondary education began to assume a more important role in training America’s youth, educators became interested in schoolhouses that visually expressed the high school’s meaningfulness to American society.

Hyde Park High School, (now William H. Ray School) designed by John J. Flanders in 1893, epitomized 1890s high school architecture in Chicago. The building was bigger than the Division schools, containing thirty-four classrooms, science laboratories, a gymnasium, and an assembly hall. Its exterior featured bands of ornament, octagonal towers, and an active roofline. The Board of Monuments to Education | 63

Much larger than the division schools that preceded it, Hyde Park High School (now William H. Ray School) epitomized 1890s Chicago high school architecture.

Education was proud of its new school and boasted “in architectural beauty [it] will compare favorably with any other public-school building in the country.”

Architecturally, Hyde Park High School signaled a transitional period in which high school buildings demanded different types of interior spaces and architects struggled to find a way to appropriately express the building’s expanding size and increasing significance on the exterior.

Under board architect William B. Mundie, Chicago high schools continued the architectural explorations begun in places such as Hyde Park High School. Mundie held the position of board architect from 1898 to 1904, longer than any of his predecessors. The floor plans of Mundie’s schools, though not uncommon for their time, were all substantially larger than the Division high schools: Wendell Phillips High School (1904), for example, held forty-eight classrooms, a lunchroom, a gymnasium, an auditorium, and spaces for extracurricular activities for its seventeen hundred students. The exteriors of Mundie’s schools, however, captured the most interest. His Renaissance and classical styles represented a break from the city’s earlier school designs and introduced an air of formality to the city’s educational architecture. In Robert A. Waller High School (1898, now Lincoln Park High School), William McKinley High 64 | Chicago History | Fall 2003

School (1900), and Phillips High School, Mundie used—for the first time for Chicago school buildings— the traditional language of classical architecture. His buildings had symmetrical facades with pronounced entrances. They all contained slightly projecting central and end pavilions, giant columns, and visually active rooflines. Mundie’s use of a grander architectural style than his predecessors ensured that the schools would stand out in their urban setting. At the turn of the century, architects often used the classical style for important civic buildings; by adopting the architectural language of power and authority, Mundie’s classical high schools made a visual statement to the public about secondary education’s growing importance in American society. Architecture legitimized public secondary education.

After Mundie resigned as board architect, his replacement, Dwight Heald Perkins, moved Chicago high school architecture away from Mundie’s classical tastes. Perkins, who became one of the nation’s preeminent school architects, designed more than forty public schools in Chicago.

Perkins’s school buildings, including his four high schools, tended toward the abstract rather than the classical in their outward appearance; he prized multicolored bricks and simplified forms over historicist ornamentation.

Above: Architects Dwight Heald Perkins (center) and A. F. Hussander (right) in front of a building in Chicago, 1908. Below: Board architect William B. Mundie continued Chicago’s tradition of the monumental high school building. William McKinley High School, built in 1900, highlighted Mundie’s use of classical architecture.

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Left: Carl Schurz High School (1910) became board architect Dwight Heald Perkins’s most famous school design, featuring Prairie School style rather than the classical motif of other Chicago high schools. Perkins’s Bowen High School (above) also featured sloping roofs that gave the building a homelike quality.

Perkins’s most famous school was the Carl Schurz High School (1910) at Milwaukee and Ashland Avenues.

Schurz and its virtual twin on the South Side—James H. Bowen High School (1910)—showed Perkins’s commitment to finding a new architectural expression for the educational building. He wanted to promote the school as a comfortable home for learning rather than as a formidable public institution symbolized in historical styles.

He commented, “When the public demands such schools as these it will have become so intelligent that it will no longer permit architects to inflict designs executed in old, dead, and inappropriate styles.” Perkins designed Schurz High School in the “Prairie School” style of his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright. The building’s huge sloping roofs, fine brickwork, and absence of ornament give it a very homelike quality—in direct contrast to the governmental style of Mundie’s high schools. The floor plan illustrates the room variety and adaptations of the evolving modern schoolhouse.

The E-shaped layout included technical shops on the ground floor to minimize disruption from the heavy equipment. The west wing contained the gymnasium and second-story running track. Perkins placed four science laboratories along the building’s façade on the second and third floors, while the girls’ vocational training rooms (textilemaking, sewing and fitting, domestic science—with a model dining room) were all on the third floor. Most of the fourth floor was devoted to rooms for artistic and mechanical drawing. A lunchroom occupied the fifth-floor attic beneath the huge roof.

Not everyone supported Perkins’s work. In 1910, Board of Education President Alfred R. Urion, who conMonuments to Education | 67

sidered Perkins’s buildings costly and poorly designed, suspended the architect on charges of “incompetence, extravagance, and insubordination.” The charges marked the culmination of a deteriorating relationship between Perkins and the board. According to various sources, Perkins had angered the board numerous times by such actions as refusing to use cut stone ornamentation, firing a politically connected building superintendent, hiring five English draftsmen, and rejecting flooring materials manufactured by a company in which Urion had a major interest. Perkins’s subsequent public hearing lasted more than two months and featured superintendent Ella Flagg Young and nationally known school architects testifying to his competence and ability. Despite support for Perkins in the local press, the board found him guilty of extravagance and removed him from office on May 1, 1910.

One of Perkins’s assistants, A. F. Hussander, took over as board architect. Ironically, despite the board’s charge that Perkins had been guilty of “monuments to himself,” Hussander rejected Perkins’s simple, homelike style, preferring an even more monumental classicism than William Mundie. Hussander continued Perkins’s exploration of open floor plans and zoned areas within the school, as increasing enrollments and expanding curricula necessitated these sprawling buildings.

Hussander’s Carter Harrison Technical High School (1912, now the Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy) represents his architectural ideas. The exterior adopted and accentuated Mundie’s classical language, with a pedimented central pavilion, a large entablature running all the way around the school, and a multitude of Ionic pilasters. Square pavilions with dual entrances anchored the building at the four corners. In plan, the building resembled a hollowed square. The floors were strictly zoned. Classrooms and offices were located around the front and sides of the first floor, with shop classes in the rear and a recreational core formed by the auditorium in the center flanked by boys’ and girls’ gymnasiums and a swimming pool. The second floor was almost completely open on the interior. Science labs lined the front, classrooms were arranged along the sides, and an immense lunchroom filled the rear. On the third and highest floor, more science labs, domestic science areas, and classrooms ringed the open court, and drafting and drawing studios formed a row across the back. A two-story shop annex trailed out from the rear corner of the main block.

Hussander followed Harrison with a series of massive schoolhouses—Nicholas Senn High School (1912), a new Hyde Park High School (1913), Edward Tilden Technical High School (1915, now Tilden Career Community Academy), and Robert Lindblom Technical High School (1915, now Lindblom College Preparatory High School). Superintendent Ella Flagg Young remarked 68 | Chicago History | Fall 2003

Board architect A. F. Hussander, Perkins’s replacement, eclipsed even Mundie’s monumental style with his sprawling Carter Harrison Technical High School (1912).

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Hussander followed Harrison Tech with Nicholas Senn High School in 1912 (opposite in 1927 with a ROTC troop in front), a new Hyde Park High School (above, under construction in 1912), and Robert Lindblom Technical High School in 1915 (right). Each of these buildings reflected the trend toward the new, larger high school with room for more varied activities.

at the time that because these new structures were so large schools would be required to double the length of time between classes to allow students to get to their next room, thus lengthening the school day by one halfhour. The original Chicago High School would have fit within Senn’s gymnasium, while the outlines of some of the city’s 1880s Division high schools were smaller than Senn’s auditorium.

By 1920, the educational and architectural elements of the modern high school were in place. Chicago had witnessed the architectural transition that accompanied the modern high school’s development. A. F. Hussander’s monumental school buildings seemed scarcely related to the unimposing Division schools of just thirty years earlier.

The schoolhouses developed during the Progressive Era in Chicago and other cities signified a new age in public 70 | Chicago History | Fall 2003

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In 1921, the Chicago Board of Education published this pamphlet to advise students that additional education could increase their future earnings.

education. The elite academy was gone, replaced by a curriculum oriented toward all adolescents and an architecture that boldly announced the maturation of an important American institution.

DN-059437; 70 bottom, from The Eagle, 1927, courtesy of Lindblom College Preparatory High School; CHS; 71, CHS, DN-0083526; 72, from Board of Education City of Chicago booklet, CHS.

Dale Allen Gyure, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of architecture at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan.

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For more on education architecture, see Educational Environments by Roger Yee (New York: Visual Reference Publications, 2003), The Importance of Physical Space in Creating Supportive Learning Environments

by Nancy Van Note Chism and Deborah Bickford (San Francisco: Jossey–Bass, 2002), and School Ways: The Planning and Design of America’s Schools by Ben E. Graves and Clifford A. Pearson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993). Architecture for Education: New School Designs from the Chicago Competition edited by Robert Sharp (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003), discusses a recent architecture competition in Chicago featuring education design. In 1989, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gallery 400 published a booklet to accompany an exhibition called Dwight Heald Perkins: Social Consciousness and Prairie School Architecture.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 52, CHS, ICHi-19126; 54 top, from History and Records of the Class of 1885, Chicago West Division High School, CHS; 54 bottom, from School Facts, October 8, 1931, courtesy of the Chicago Board of Education; 55 top, CHS; 55 bottom, School Facts, courtesy of the Chicago Board of Education; 56–57, CHS; 57, CHS, DN-0086140; 58, portfolio photograph from “The Perkins Papers,” appeared in Dwight Heald Perkins: Social Consciousness & Prairie School Architecture (University of Illinois at Chicago, 1989); 59, CHS, DN0009245; 60, CHS, ICHi-17094; 62, CHS, ICHi-17877; 63–64, CHS; 65 top, CHS, DN-0052317; 65 bottom, CHS, DN-0003128; 66-67, DN-0056194; 67–69, CHS; 70 top, CHS, 72 | Chicago History | Fall 2003