Chicago Varnish Company

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Chicago Varnish Company, Hunter, Walton & Co., Ehrat Cheese company, Kinzie Steakhouse, Miller’s Steakhouse, Harry Caray’s Restaurant
Life Span: ~1877-1895, Rebuilt 1895-Present
Location: Block No. 1, Dearborn av SE cor Kinzie (33 W Kinzie)
Architect: Henry Ives Cobb

Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, 1877

Parker, Coit & Co

Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, 1880
Parker, Coit & Co, (Charles H. Parker, William A. and William B. Coit) paints etc. 206 Kinzie

Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, 1885
Coit & Co. (William A. and William B =. Coit) paints 206 Kinzie

A. N. Marquis & Co.’s Business Directory of Chicago, 1886-1887
Coit & Co. paint manfrs. 206 E. Kinzie, T. 3192

Lakeside Business Directory of the City of Chicago, 1899
Chicago Varnish Co O H Morgan pres; W S Potwin treas and gen mngr; Dearborn av se cor Kinzie tel Central-871

Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, 1904
Chicago Varnish Co O H Morgan pres; W S Potwin treas and gen mngr; Dearborn av se cor Kinzie tel Central-871

Lakeside Business Directory of the City of Chicago, 1907
Chicago Varnish Co O H Morgan pres; W S Potwin treas and gen mngr; Dearborn av se cor Kinzie tel Central-371

Chicago Central Business and Office Building Directory, 1908
Chicago Varnish Co Dearborn av and Kinzie C371 and 1408, 279 Dearborn H2425

Chicago Central Business and Office Building Directory, 1922
Fox Geo E & Co office supplies 35 W Kinzie Cen 5627
Renauld Maison perfumery importers 33-35 W Kinzie tel Central 6379

Polk’s Chicago Numerical Street and Avenue Directory, 1928
Hunter Walton & Co whol butter 33-35 W Kinzie
Energy Tonic Co 35 W Kinzie
Forman Nathan food importer 35 W Kinzie
Hall Manufactoring Co phonograph needles 35 W Kinzie
North H J flooring contr 35 W Kinzie
Teteak Jas whol food products 35 W Kinzie

Chicago Tribune, November 23, 1877

The following building permits were issued yesterday:
Z. Sawyer, for the erection of two two-story stores at the corner of Kinzie and Dearborn streets, to cost $12,000; and to the Herrick estate, for the erection of four-story store at No. 103 Lake street, to cost $10,000.

Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1878

To Rent—Six New Lofts,30×10 Each, Corner Kinzie and Dearborn sts., suitable for manufacturing purposes; will rent for term of years. F. Sawyer, corner Kinzie-st. and Dearborn-av.

Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1892

Sales of North and South Side Realty.
Madden Brothers report the sale of 45×90 feet at the southeast corner of Dearborn avenue and Kinzie street for $60,000. This corner, improved with a 3-story brick building, was sold for Michael Espert to B. C. Chambers. It is stated that Mr. Chambers represents the Chicago Varnish company, which will occupy the building May 1.

Chicago Eagle, March 10, 1894

W. B. Coit Is a Red Hot Candidate.
Wm. B. Coit was born in Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1850, moved to Tennessee in 1860 and was within the Confederate lines until Memphis was cap-tured. He was educated at East-hampton, Mass., and at Yale. Took great interest in Republican politics in the South during the reconstruction period and was a member of the Legislature when only 21 years old, being the youngest member and gaining the reputation of doing more for his district than any other member. On his vote depended once the election of a United States Senator. He came to Chicago in 1870, settling in the Twelfth Ward, and commenced to manufacture paints. corner of Kinzie and Dearborn, remaining there until six years ago, when he erected that fine building at 33 and 35 West Washington street. He is President of Colt & Co., one of the largest paint houses In Chicago, employing on the road fifteen travelers. He is a true-blue American of the first water. His ancestors coming to this country from the north of Wales in 1702, settling in Connecticut. The family furnished heroes for the wars of 1778, 1812, and 1861—General Colt, of Norwich, Conn., in the last war. Hon. Anthony Ames, his uncle, 75 years of age and still young, is President of the Board of Education of the State of Connecticut. Colt’s blood strain is Welsh, Scotch, and Irish, thoroughly Amer Icanized for 102 years in America.

He enjoys the confidence of the paint trade to a remarkable degree, his word being as good as his bond. Such leading Democrats as B. F. and Rivers McNeill, Tom Klernan (the successful champion of State Senator Salomon), Mike Gleason, Ed Shaweross, and Eugene Sullivan are his outspoken friends. There is talk now of making no nomination against Colt. A good feature about Colt is he is a square little fellow, close to the boys, and easily approuched.

Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1895

BUILDING PERMITS
The Chicago Varnish Co., 1 brick addtl. story and alterations, 206-208 Kinzie-st….$15,000

Chicago Chronicle, October 20, 1895

Henry Ives Cobb has finished plans for a new building for the Chicago Varnish Company and work on the construction has been begun at Dearborn avenue and Kinzie street. The building will be of four stories, in the Dutch style, with several picturesque stepped gables. The steep root is of bright red tile, harmonizing with the dull red brick and white stone used in the body of the building.

Inter Ocean, October 27, 1895

An illustration is published herewith (below) showing the office structure of the Chicago Varnish Company, southeast corner Kinzie and North Clark streets, Henry Ives Cobb, architect. It is the only bullding of the pure Flemish or Dutch type of architecture in the city. The three exposed sides, north, west, and south, are treated architecturally. The building is nearly completed.

Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1925

BUYS NORTH SIDE CORNER
Thomas A. Somerville of Hunter, Walton & Co., has bought the southeast comer of Kinzie and Dearborn, 45×90, from the Chicago Varnish company, for a reported $75,000. Hunter, Walton & Co. have occupied the first floor of the building for many years with their butter business. Albert H Wetten & Co. were brokers.

Chicago Tribune, January 5, 1941

CHEESE COMPANY BUYS DEARBORN, KINZIE CORNER
The Ehrat Cheese company, for many years at 55 East Hubbard street, yesterday bought the one time home of the Chicago Varnish company, a Dutch type four story building at the southeast corner of Dearborn avenue and Kinzie street, 44 by 90 feet, for $25,000, according to revenue stamps on the deed. The sellers were John, Esther, and Helen Somerville. Louis B. Beardslee & Co. represented the buyer and George S. Ballard & Co. the sellers. The new owner, it was said, will spend about $25,000 in modernizing the property and installing a refrigeration system.

Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1971

ON THE TOWN
On Kinzie Street
All our life, we’ve wanted to see the interior of that colorful building at the southeast corner of Kinzie and Dearborn Streets, with the fancy stonework and the even fancier gables. They said it was Dutch renaissance architecture, which didn’t mean much to a columnist who knows about Burnham and Root, and Adler and Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, but nothing about the Netherlands.

This week, we got into the place, which is the newest addition to the ever-increasing string of restaurants in the Jacques French Restaurant Group. No peasant Hollander ever saw anything like this! It’s rich, ripe, rococo. A sirloin goes for $6.75; a rack of lamb retails for $5.95. Lobsters, broiled or steamed, are “priced to market.” These are tough days to be running a restaurant and trying to watch that price line!

Chicago Tribune, October 25, 1987

HOLY COW! IT’S HARRY CARAY’S
Crushed between a shoulder to the front and an elbow behind, this full-frontal-assault easily could have been a beer line in the left field bleachers, Then, baptized from above by a stein of amber brew, all doubt was washed away: This well-lubricated vise belonged more in Wrigley Field than a North Loop restaurant opening.

Not just any old eatery, Holy Cow! this one’s named Harry Caray’s, and just about every mug that’s ever tipped a few with the Mayor of Rush Street was somewhere in this human stew.

“Is he running for president yet?” asked a man in a propeller-topped beanie who said he was “the Bleacher Preacher,” Jerry Pritikin. “Harry missed coming out to the bleachers this year so you might say this is his trip to the bleachers.

“At the bleachers you wouldn’t see the $60 ties you see in this crowd,” he noted. “But Harry’s fans wear anything and everything. Even nothing I guess if there’s a nudist colony with a satellite dish.” Indeed, the man with the twin-TV-screen glasses is every fan’s fan wherever Chicago Cubs baseball blares from the tube. That 1s, in 46 states where WGN is broadcast and in parts of Central America where it’s bootlegged.

This night, though, it was on his very own turf that the voice of the Cubs was being toasted. And the line-up was all-star:

Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks, was there, wrapping his arm around Harry. “What we love about Harry is, whether things are up or down, he makes us laugh. Ir all walks of life, he has a magic ao lew in from C.A. of Famer, Wednesday’s opening of Harry’s steak, pasta and chop house in the old Miller’s Steak House at Kinzie and Dearborn.

“In the city of big mouths, he’s the biggest one,” mumbled Mike Royko, shufiling toward the palm-lined vestibule where Harry was holding court.

Rich Melman, who knows something about serving up vittles, bit into a toasted ravioli and said of the man known for haunting his night spots: “We’re losing a helluva customer, but this is what Harry means to Chicago. He’s vital, he’s alive. He’s the Mike Ditka of the broadcasting booth. He lives and dies for the Cubs to win and we love him for it. He’s a legend.”

Aaron Freeman, the man who made a comedy of Council Wars, opined: “Harry Caray opening a restaurant is like a cold beer on a hot summer day. You just gotta love it.”

Noting the lack of breathing room, he said: “This is definitely the A list. There are so many beautiful people, I can’t find room in front of the mirror.”

The host himself, sipping often from a tall glass of ice water, took a moment from back-slapping the boys and bussing the girls to note: “I feel great about this. There has to be affection involved, me for them and them for me. One of the reasons I thought about a restaurant is the chance to rub elbows with the people I love—the fans.”

Chicago Tribune, August 30, 2020

On one of those horrifyingly hot days this week, few people were out and about around the corner of Dearborn and Kinzie streets. Four restaurants sit on this corner and one of them is very old and very popular and when I ask the man who runs it “how’s business?” Grant DePorter smiled a thin smile, shrugged and said, “Well, we are operating at 25% capacity.”

It is tough all over but DePorter, the CEO of Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group, oversees the operation of seven restaurants. On this day he was standing in Harry Caray’s, 33 W. Kinzie, in a small room on the building’s fourth and highest floor and showing me a fascinating item and talking about the past, a healthy excursion in a world so currently troubled and with a future so uncertain.

“This,” he says, picking up a thick book comprised of brittle pages filled with florid longhand writing (a bit faded by still quite legible), “is my Rosetta Stone.”

What he means is that this book charts the lengthy history of this piece of land, which was designated the city’s first block in 1830, seven years before it was incorporated as a city. The original owner was a man named Alexander Wolcott Jr., who had arrived here by canoe and became the area’s first doctor. He married Ellen Kinzie, the first non Native American born here, daughter of settlers John and Eleanor Kinzie.

More firsts? John Kinzie committed the first murder here in 1812 when he stabbed to death an unfortunate fellow named Jean La Lime. The Wolcott-Kinzie union was the first marriage in Chicago. The property was later purchased by William B. Ogden, the city’s first mayor and owner of the city’s first brewery. The building there later housed the law offices of lawyer Grant Goodrich, who practiced with Abraham Lincoln, co-founded Northwestern University and was an ardent advocate for the temperance movement.

The “modern” history of the property begins in 1892 when the land was purchased by the Chicago Varnish Co., which hired architect H.I. Cobb to design the Dutch Renaissance building that was finished in 1895 and still stands.

I like to think I know a great deal about the history of this place, in part because my father, Herman, was a

newspaperman who wrote many books about the city’s raucous past. DePorter credits his father, Donald, the late Hyatt Hotels executive and one-time chairman of the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, with instilling in him an affection for the city.

“He was so engaged in the civic life and the people of Chicago,” he said.

Of course, the Kinzie-Dearborn building is filled with visual tributes to its namesake, that charming broadcasting legend who died in 1998. It also is liberally decorated with photos and other memorabilia of sports figures and celebrities. The place has long been a magnet for such folks, and for the tourists and locals who pile in for the food and drinks and star-studded ambiance.

DePorter has been so energetic and inventive about promoting his restaurants that he might rightly carry the title of showman. He has co-authored a 2008 book, Hoodoo: Unraveling the 100 Year Mystery of the Chicago Cubs (Rare Air Limited), written with Elliott Harris and Mark Vancil. He stages all manner (and a countless num-ber) of special events. Late in 2003, he paid $113,824.16 for what was known as the “Bartman Ball,” which was exploded early in 2004 in a nationally televised event from the restaurant, with money raised going to charity.

That’s all fine and ad-mirable, but on a deeper level DePorter is also a passionate historian and the ancient building’s walls are filled with thousands of documents (newspaper clippings, photos and more) that make it – if you’re be wise enough to wander about and look and read – something of an artful and accessible history museum. Wildly entertaining too.

Much of this material is from a checkered past, when the building was a speakeasy and was later owned by Frank Nitti and his wife. Nitti, often obscured by the scar-faced shadow of his associate Al Capone, is an under-appre-ciated gangster who ran the Chicago Outfit from 1932 until his death in 1943. His third wife, Annette, was also a formidable presence and owned the building until 1969. (Read more about this interesting couple in next Tuesday’s Chicago Tribune.)

In 1971 the building began its eatery life, first as the Kinzie Steakhouse and then Miller’s Kinzie Steak-house, before becoming Harry Caray’s in 1987. It was an immediate hit and over the decades has been the scene of many discoveries: a large safe found inside a wall; a secret room uncovered by an electrician drilling holes for wiring; a personal phone book found hidden in a wall, found by a carpenter; and in 2018 another safe, belonging to Frank Nitti, discovered behind a bricked-up door-way.

That latter event led to considerable TV news coverage and compelled members of the Nitti family to contact DePorter. He has so far met 18 members of that brood, including three grandchildren, many of whom have shared photos, memorabilia and, most arrestingly, that “Rosetta Stone” that contains all the title documents. DePorter has hosted some of the Nittis for dinners and has grown very fond of them. “Some of their stories, which they are eager to share, are just fascinating.” he says.

He then delightedly shows me a video he shot while wandering though some of the still unexplored spaces inside the 34,000-square-foot building. It looks like some clip from a PBS documentary of an archaeologist searching for a tomb inside a pyramid, all rubble and dust. “I do think there may be more to discover in this building,” he says. “Oh, I don’t know….Maybe a million dollars, maybe a long dead body.”

The pandemic has allowed DePorter to devote time to his historical research and it has been time well spent. He has added more photos and newspaper articles to the walls and, thanks to materials provided by and conversation with the Nitti family, he has new stories to tell.

Business may not be what it once was, but DePorter, who lives nearby with his wife, talks optimistically about very soon expanding his restaurant’s outdoor seating into what had been a shuttered Bar Louie space to the south.

Friday marks the 200th anniversary of Dr. Wolcott moving onto the property. No party is planned. DePorter will be alone in his office in the building which used to be, of course, part of Frank Nitti’s apartment.

A dining room at Harry Caray’s in the historic 33 W. Kinzie building in River North.

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