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Rush Street Bridge

Chicago Illustrated, February 1866

RUSH STREET BRIDGE, is but one of a series of views intended to give a fair, general representation of the river and harbor of Chicago. The sketch is taken from the new bridge at State street, and looks eastwardly to Rush-street bridge. There was no bridge upon the river east of Clark street until 1857. Previous to that time the only means of crossing was by a rope ferry at the point where now stands Rush-street bridge. In the fall of 1856 this ferry boat, while crowded with passengers, was run down by a passing tug, and some some six or eight lives were lost, and then steps were taken to erect a bridge at that place.

The undertaking was a large one for the time. The river was somewhat strengthened—or perhaps it should be said that the bend in the river was made less abrupt—by widening it on the side. Near the south end of the bridge there stood the inner light-jouse, which was then discontinued. Old Fort Dearborn, from which Chicago took the name it bore for many years, was situated near the south end of this bridge, and was torn down about the time the bridge was built.

The bridge built upon this site, in 1857, was an iron bridge of handsome construction, and cost, including the mason work of the central pier, and of the adjustments and approached, fifty-ywo thousand dollars. It was built by Harper and Tweedale, and was considered a model of strength and durability. The bridge was two hundred and nine feet long and thirty-three feet wide, turning upon a pivot in the water. The approaches measured. south forty feet, north seventy feet. In November, 1863, while a small vessel approaching, a herd of cattle was driven upon the bridge. The driver, unable to understand the remonstrances of the bridge-tender, or unable to control the movements of the cattle, disregarded the signal, and did not check the animals. The bridge was swung, to avoid a collision with the vessel; and when it got clear of the supports, the great weight of the cattle on one end caused it to slip from its central balance, and it then broke and fell into the river, a shapeless mass of broken and twisted iron. Though several persons were on the bridge at the time, no serious injury was sustained. A large number of cattle was drowned, and others were killed beneath the fragments of the broken bridge.

The new structure, which is represented in this view, is of the same dimensions as the original bridge, but is built of wood. Fox and Howard, of Chicago, erected it in 1864, for the city, at a cost of ten thousand dollars.

On the left of the picture is the elevator of the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, now one of the Northwestern Railway Company, and on the right is seen Jewett and Root’s stove warehouse. It will be seen that Bennet Pieters and Company had, at the time the sketch was taken, sole occupancy of the fenders of the new bridge, in advertising their famous Red Jacket Bitters.

James W. Sheehan, Esq.,
February 1866

Ferris Wheel

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This chief wonder of the Fair was designed by George Washington Gale Ferris. At a Saturday afternoon club dinner, in a city chop-house, while the Fair was building, Mr. Ferris conceived the idea of the wheel. During that dinner, he decided on the size, the construction, the number of cars at thirty-six, the number of seats in each car, the admission fee, the plan of stopping six times in the first revolution to load and another revolution without stopping, and these details, as then instantly recorded on paper, were never altered.

Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1893
Abstract in Scientific American, July 1, 1893

“What on earth is that?” This is the astonished inquiry that every passenger on the Illinois Central, the “L,” and the steamboat lines on the lake makes as soon as he gets his first sight of the Ferris Wheel. And he asks it afar off, for the wheel is the landmark of the Fair.

His inquiry should be, “What in the air is that?” for if there is anything on or near the Exposition grounds besides the captive balloon that is not on the earth it is the Ferris Wheel. At first it looks as the great trusses of the Manufactures Building used to look before the roof was on. But, as it towers higher and is seen to be circular instead of semicircular, the spectator can form no idea what it is until he is told. It is beyond all question the crowning novelty of the Exposition as the Eiffel tower was of the Paris Exposition. To that it is superior in some respects, for it has the element of motion instead of being an inert mass, and presents engineering difficulties with which man never before grappled.

When was made the first wheel similar to this in construction, in a general way, and for amusement purposes, no one knows. The idea is an old one. But the gigantic toy on the Midway Plaisance was born two years ago in the mind of George W. G. Ferris, a 36-year-old Pittsburg engineer, the head of the firm of G. W. G. Ferris & Co. and the firm of Ferris, Kaufman & Co. in that city. He was so confident that he had a bonanza that, while he proceeded at once to prepare the plans, he did not broach the subject to any one until eighteen months ago.

His first confidants were a number of other engineers, who, when he had submitted his plans, were greatly divided as to the feasibility of the project. Some of them thought that the wheel could be built and would be a money-maker, while others were free to say that they did not believe it could ever be made either to revolve or to pay.

Getting a Concession.
Mr. Ferris, however, was a self-reliant man, and withal a financial hustler, and he went straight forward and organized the Ferris Wheel company, which was capitalized at $600,000, and soon issued and sold $300,000 worth of bonds. He then went before the Ways and Means committee of the Exposition with his scheme, and very naturally got sat down upon with great vehemence. After months of urging he succeeded in obtaining a concession, which, however, was afterward revoked. Still Mr. Ferris was not discouraged, but renewed his efforts and finally secured another concession. This was not granted until last December, and the terms were that the company was to pay the Exposition one-half of all its receipts after they had amounted to the cost of the wheel. Every particle of the work has been contracted for and done since then. The iron of which the wheel is composed was pig-iron in January, and the scaffolding was not begun until March 20.

The site assigned the company is in the middle of the plaisance, leaving a passageway fifty-five feet wide on each side of it. The space is 150 feet square, on the west side of Lexington avenue, if extended through the plaisance, with an annex 120×70 feet on the remove-surplus center of the west side. The great wheel is 250 feet in diameter, 825 feet in circumference, and thirty feet in width. As it is elevated fifteen feet above the ground a spectator on the top of it will look out upon the landscape at an elevation of 265 feet.

How the Wheel Is Made.
The wheel is composed of two wheels of the same size, connected and held together with rods and struts, which, however, do not approach closer than twenty feet to the periphery. Each wheel has for its outline a curved, hollow, square iron beam, 25½ X 19 inches. At a distance of 40 feet within this circle is another circle of a lighter beam. These beams are called crowns, and are connected and held together by an elaborate trusswork. Within this smaller circle there are no beams, and at a distance there appears to be nothing. But at the center of the great wheel is an immense iron axle, 32 inches thick and 45 feet in length Each of the twin wheels, where the axle passes through it, is provided with a large iron hub, 16 feet in diameter. Between these hubs and the inner “crowns” there are no connections except spoke rods, 2½ inches in diameter, arranged in pairs, 13 feet apart at the crown connection. At a distance they look like mere spider webs, and the wheel seems to be dangerously devoid of substantial support.

The explanation of this is that the Ferris wheel—at least inside the smaller crowns—is constituted on the principle of a bicycle wheel. The lower half is suspended from the axle by the spoke rods running downward, and the upper half of the wheel is supported by the lower half. All the spoke rods running from the axle north, when it is in any given position, might be removed, and the wheel would be as solid as it would be with them. The only difference is that the Ferris wheel hangs by its axle, while a bicycle wheel rests on the ground, and the weight is applied downward on the axle.

How Passengers Are Carried.
The great wheel has thirty-six carriages for passengers hung on its periphery at equal intervals. Each car is twenty-seven feet long, thirteen feet wide, and nine feet high. It has a heavy frame of iron, but is covered externally with wood. It has a door and five broad plate glass windows on each side. It contains forty revolving chairs, made of wire and screwed to the floor. It weighs thirteen tons, and with its forty passengers will weigh three tons more. It is suspended from the periphery of the wheel by an iron axle six and one-half inches in diameter, which runs through the roof. It is provided with a conductor to open the doors, preserve order, and give information. To avoid accidents from panics and to prevent insane people from jumping out, the windows will be covered with an iron grating. It is probable that one car in six will be reserved for smokers.

It is being considered whether each car shall not have a telephone connection with the office on the ground. It is thought that this would be an attraction, both as a sort of amusement for people who wished to converse with their friends below or in an other car and as a sort of reassurance to timid people. The thought of being detained up in the clouds, as it were, by accident, and not being able to learn what it is or when it will be remedied, might frighten some timid people out of making the trip. It is not very difficult, however, to climb by the wheel itself to any car, and there will always be men on the ground who can do this.

chiday

Foundations of Concrete and Steel.
The wheel, with its cars and passengers, weighs about 1,200 tons, and therefore needs something substantial to hold it up. Its axis is supported, therefore, on two skeleton iron towers, pyramidal in form, one at each end of it. They are 40 x 50 feet at the bottom and 6 feet square at top, and about 140 feet high, the side next to the wheel being perpendicular, and the other sides slanting. Each tower has four great feet, and each foot rests on an underground concrete foundation 20x20x20 feet. Crossbars of steel are laid at the bottom of the concrete, and the feet of the tower are connected with and bolted to them with iron rods.

One would naturally suppose that there would be great danger of making such a huge wheel as this lopsided or untrue, so that it would not revolve uniformly. Even if the wheel itself were perfectly true, it would seem that the unequal distribution of passengers might make it eccentric in its speed. But according to L. V. Rice, the superintendent of construction, there is absolutely no danger of this kind. Not only did the wheel alone turn uniformly, but when the cars were hung, one after another, no inequality was observed. As to passengers, Mr. Rice says that the 1,400 passengers will have no more effect on the movements of the speed than if they were so many flies.

chiday

The wheel, however, is never left to itself, but is always directly and constantly controlled by a steam engine. The wheel points east and west, and the one thousand horse power reversible engine which runs it is located under the east half of it and sunk four feet in the ground. The machinery is very similar to that used in the power houses of the cable car companies, and runs with the same hoarse roar that they do. It operates a north-and south iron shaft 12 inches in diameter, with great cog wheels at each end, by means of which the power is applied at each side of the wheel.

Power and Brakes.
The periphery of both of the great outer crowns of the great wheel is cogged, the cogs being about six inches deep and about eighteen inches apart; and the power of the engine is applied at the bottom of the wheel. Underneath the wheel, in line with the crown on each side, are two sprocket wheels nine feet in diameter, with their centers sixteen feet apart. They are connected by driving chain, which plays on the cogs of the great wheel wheels are operated by the engineer, who can turn slowly, as he may an immense endless their own cogs and as well. These sprocket engine at the will of the the wheel either way, and fast or wish.

But to make assurance doubly sure the great wheel is also provided with brakes. Near the north and south ends of the main shaft are two ten-feet wheels, with smooth faces, and girdled with steel bands. These bands terminate a little to one side in a large Westinghouse air-brake. If therefore anything should break, arid the engine fail to work, the air can be turned into the air-brake, and the steel band tightened until not a wheel in the whole machine can turn.

In the construction of this great wheel every conceivable danger has been calculated and provided for. Windage was the thing of greatest importance. for, although the wheel itself is all open work, the cars present an immense resisting surface. But Mr. Rice points to his two towers, with their bases fifty feet north and south of the wheel, and bolted into twenty feet of concrete, aud says that a gale of 100 miles an hour wonld have no effect. He says that all the frost and snow that could adhere to the wheel in winter would not affect it and that if struck by lightning it would absorb and dissipate the thunderbolt so that it would not be felt.

How to Get on Board.
It is arranged to empty and refill six cars with passengers at a times so that there will be six stops in every revolution. Accordingly six railed platforms of varying heights have been provided on the north side ot the wheel and six more, corresponding with these, on the south side of it. When the wheel stops each of the six lowest cars will have a platform at each of its doors. The passengers will step out of the south doors and other passengers will step in at the north doors. Then the next six cars will be served the same way, and the next and next all day and perhaps all night. It is expected that the wheel will revolve only once in every twenty minutes. Passengers will remain on board during two revolutions and pay fifty cents for their fun.

Scientific American added the following:
The wheel is 250 feet in diameter, 825 feet in circumference, and 30 feet wide, and is elevated 15 feet above the ground.
ticket
The great wheel is also provided with brakes. Near the north and south ends of the main shaft are two ten-feet wheels, with smooth faces, and girdled with steel bands. These bands terminate a little to one side in a large Westinghouse air brake. If therefore anything should break, and the engine fail to work, the air can be turned into the air brake, and the steel band tightened until not a wheel in the whole machine can turn. In the construction of this great wheel every conceivable danger has been calculated and provided for. Windage was a matter of the greatest importance, for, although the wheel itself is all open work, the cars present an immense resisting surface. But Mr. Rice points to the two towers, with their bases fifty feet north and south of the wheel, and bolted into twenty feet of concrete, and says that a gale of 100 miles an hour would have no effect. He says that all the frost and snow that could adhere to the wheel in winter would not affect it; and that if struck by lightning it would absorb and dissipate the thunderbolt so that it would not be felt.

It is arranged to empty and refill six cars with passengers at a time, so that there will be six stops in every revolution. Accordingly six railed platforms, of varying heights, have been provided on the north side of the wheel, and six more, corresponding with these, on the south side of it. When the wheel stops, each of the six lowest cars will have a platform at each of its doors. The passengers will step out of the south doors and other passengers will step in at the north doors. Then the next six cars will be served the same way, and the next and the next all day, and perhaps all night. It is expected that the wheel will revolve only once in every twenty minutes. Passengers will remain on board during two revolutions and pay fifty cents for their fun.

The Ferris Wheel Co. was capitalized at $600,000, and $300,000 worth of bonds were issued and sold. The final concession for the erection of the wheel was not granted until December, and all the work has been contracted for and done since then, the iron having been in the pig in January, while the scaffolding was not begun until March 20. By the terms of the concession, the company pays to the Exposition one-half of all its receipts after they have amounted to the cost of the wheel. On the day the wheel was first started, June 21, 5,000 guests were present at the inaugural ceremonies, all of whom were given a ride on the great wheel. The motion of the machinery is said to have been almost imperceptible.

Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1893

THE LIGHTING OF THE GREAT WHEEL.
The Work Done By The Western Electric Company of Chicago.
Like a rainbow of promise the great wheel stands out at night the admiration of the multitudes who have journeyed from the four corners of the earth. Magnificent and awe-inspiring as it is at all times it is doubly so when the electric current is turned on and nearly 2,500 lamps illumine the celebrated wheel like a circle of fire.

Mr. Ferris made a wise selection when he arranged with the Western Electric company of this city to install the plant to furnish the electric illumination. No company in this line of business is more favorably known or has established a more wide-spread reputation than has the Western Electric. They are in touch with the latest improvements in electrical lighting, and indeed are the originators of many new and admirable features which, after once being adopted, are acknowledged to be indispensable.

The lights of the Ferris wheel are operated from two 800 light compound wound dynamos, made by the company and which have given the very highest degree of satisfaction. The station is established on Lexington avenue and the wires are run from there in conduit to distribution house in the enclosure, where are located main fuse cut-outs to protect the wiring system. technical description is impossible within the limits of this article, but to all who feel an interest in the matter the invitation is extended to call and the system will be fully explained.

The Western Electric company have been in existence for more than twenty-one years, and in that time have made a wonderful growth. The main offices are in this city, being located at No. 227 South Clinton street. They have established branch offices in New York, London, Paris, Antwerp, and Berlin.

They have the most extensive exhibit in Electricity Building. and their “Electric Scenic Theater” in the southeast corner is free and open to the general public, and a cordial invitation is extended to every Exposition visitor to call and witness the beautiful and interesting display.

The character of the work done and the class of machinery and appliances introduced by this company have been such as to give them a standing second to none other in the United States, and their recent suecess in illuminating the great wheel will add another to the long list of difficult undertakings which they have carried out with the most satisfactory results both to the company and to its patrons.

Picturesque World’s Fair, An Elaborate Collection of Colored Views—Published with the Endorsement and Approval of George R. Davis, 1894

THE FERRIS WHEEL.

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A VIEW THROUGH THE FERRIS WHEEL.

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THE FERRIS WHEEL BY NIGHT.

Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1893

SUE THE FERRIS WHEEL COMPANY.
The Exposition Managers Want to Got Hold of That $75,000.
As expected the World’s Columnbian Exposition has commenced an action against the Ferris Wheel company to secure payment of percentages amounting to $75,000. The papers were filed in the Circuit Court yesterday. Under a contract made with the promoters of tho wheel scheme the Exposition company claims it was to receive half the earnings after these exceeded $300,000. Tab was kept upon the number of admissions to the wheel by the Exposition Bureau, and a claim of $150,000 was made upon the wheel company as the Exposition’s share of the earnings after the $300,000 mark had been passed. The wheel company, it is said, paid to the Exposition $75,000. and retained the remaining $75,000 on deposit in the Union National Bank. Its officers hold among other things that the Exposition company has broken its contract in closing the Midway to visitors before January next.

Ferris Wheel Car

Ferris Wheel Under Construction

Ferris Wheel

Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1893

The Ferris wheel cars have been provided with oil stoves. The wheel is bound to run until January 4. The paid admissions to the World’s Fair yesterday were as follows: Whole tickets, 1,395; half tickets, 16; total, 1,411. Photo by Lewis M. Melander.

Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1895

NOW ANOTHER FERRIS WHEEL FIGHT.
Amendment of the Amusement Ordinance Signed by Mayor Swift. Mayor Swift yesterday signed the amendatory amusement ordinance passed by the Council Monday night. The object was to prevent the operation of the Ferris Wheel at North Clark street and Wrightwood avenue.

Corporation Counsel Palmer said yesterday:
“The decision of the Appellate Court in no way interferes with the action of the Council. The decision is that the company may erect the wheel and that there shall be no interference on the part of the city. The ordinance has reference to issuing permits for amusements. The Ferris Wheel company has not asked for this kind of a permit. The city will take no action until it does or until it attempts to open an amusement of the character referred to in the amendatory ordinance.”

Property-owners who desire to prevent the operation of the wheel have prepared to test the validity of the new ordinance in the courts. The Ferris Wheel people believe the measure is not valid. Henry S. Robbins, their attorney, says he will advise the company to proceed with the erection of the structure. General Manager Rice of the Ferris Wheel company said yesterday he looked on the ordinance as a persecution.

“The Ferris Wheel will do no injury whatever,” he said. “People have an idea that we will have a street in Cairo, dancing girls, and every other sort of Midway feature. It is all bosh. We will have a dining-room and café, and possibly a summer opera, and certainly there will be music. But the lights will all be out by 10:30 o’clock, and the admission will be 50 cents. Everything will be scrupulously respectable. The City Council has no rignt to suppress such a business, and we will see that it does not do so. We shall have the wheel running Aug. 15.”

Views taken on August 14, 1895 of the Ferris Wheel being reassembled at 2653 N. Clark Street.

Inter Ocean, September 29, 1895

The big Ferris wheel which was one of the great features of the Midway is once more in operation.

Ever since It was torn down at the close of the World’s Fair the Ferris wheel has been an incongruous mass of iron until a little over six weeks ago, when it was transported to the North Side. For nearly four months the workmen have been at work at Wrightwood avenue and Clark street preparing to put the Ferris wheel in motion once more. A massive foundation of crossbars, concrete, and solid masonry was put in. This is twenty-nine feet deep and it took nearly three months and an expenditures of $40,000 to complete this portion of the work alone.

This complete, the workmen began to shape the mass of iron and steel into the large wheel which delighted so many visitors to the World’s Fair. For thirty-five days this work has been going on, and now the wheel is complete again. Yesterday the large engines which operate the big wheel were started, and the 2,300 tons of iron and steel were put In motion. The wheel revolves as easily as before it was torn down, and nearly all the clank and jar that attended its operation at Jackson Park are now absent, and it cannot be heard one-half a block distance. The same powerful, engines, drive the machinery, and the whole went together without a hitch. .

During the past week the management have had a force of 250 men busy rushing the work, and inside of a week, it is expected to have the big wheel ready to throw open to the public. Thursday was the day fixed, but it is doubtful if the wheel will be ready by that time. The cars have all been remodeled, and now the interior is of hardwood finish and the glazing is of double strength French plate.

The grounds around the wheel are in an unfinished state. It is intended to erect a summer opera pavilion just north of the wheel and around the machinery are located restaurants and promenades. In the southwest corner of the grounds will be a dining hall and cafe. The main floor is to consist of a large dining hail; the second will be devoted to private dining-rooms and a large banquet hall, while the third floor mill be reserved for the use of the employes.

It was not the intention of the management to open the grounds before next spring, when they have arranged to have the grounds beautified by 10,000 roses, twenty-eight small trees and other shrubs, and 15,000 electric lights. An orchestra of thirty pieces will discourse music and the opera pavilion will have an English opera company for a attraction.

The wheel itself will be open in a week, if the company carries out its present intentions, and visitors will have an opportunity to see Chicago from the clouds. The wheel is located ea one ef the highest points in the city. The wheel can be easily seen from Garfield Park. From the top a much better view of the city can be secured than when at Jackson Park. It is the intention to make the whole a single admission fee, and giving the visitors as much of a ride as they want. After paying at the gate a person can attend the opera, ride an hour, get out of the wheel, dine at the restaurant, and then go back and ride, all for one price of admission, with the exception of the dinner, of course. The grounds will be transformed into a park and efforts will be made to make wheel parties a fad among the fashionable people next year, and elegantly furnished dining-rooms will be one of the attractions.

Chicago Tribune, September 23, 1900

Ferris’ big wheel as a locomotive roundhouse for some enterprising railroad company is the latest novel purpose proposed for the disposition of that piece of gigantic machinery. Horace L. Fergus, 1507 Wolfram street, is the originator of the idea. He would have it laid over on its side, roofed over in regulation roundhouse fashion, and yet keep to its business of turning, thus receiving seventy-two locomotives if necessary from the one single track leading to its periphery. Frogs, turn tables, and switches would be done away with, and, as Mr. Fergus suggests, one of the most novel roundhouses in the world would be the result.

For seven years persons more or less associated in recollection with the World’s Fair have been suggesting the thing to do with the Ferris wheel. It has been Ixionic in its burdensomeness ever since it was erected in the Midway Plaisance of the exposition. Some one with more levity than practicality suggested that another one be built like it, that chain and sproket wheels be placed between, and some “scorcher” be elected to ride it into the Atlantic or the Pacific in pace-mak-ing time. Last spring it was to have gone to Germany as an amusement venture, but somehow the steamer that might have taken it wouldn’t wait for it.

Need to Pull to Pieces.
For the first time a Chicago man has had a real idea as to its best disposition and engineers pick some flaws in that. Mr. Fergus does not pretend to solve the engineering problem connected with the conversion of the wheel into the roundhouse. But he insists that it is quite possible as a practical proposition; as to whether it would cost more than it comes to, he cannot say. Mr. Fergus said:

Back of the engine stalls and in the center of the big wheel there would be room for a machine and repair shop. The capacity of the rim would be seventy-two engines, two standing side by side In each of the thirty-six spaces now occupied by the passenger cars of the wheel. The rollers under this rim could be fashioned after those under Chicago center pier bridges, thus reducing the friction to a minimum. The thickness of the wheel is great enough to provide all the elevation necessary to the biggest roundhouse. In completing the house the methods used in steel construction buildings might be carried out in detail.

T. Jordan, assistant engineer for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy rallroad, admits all the novelty and all the possibility which Mr. Fergus claims for his scheme. But at the same time he is of the opinion that if he were building a roundhouse and were offered the Ferris wheel at its value as scrap steel, he would not accept it for the purpose. Mr. Jordan said:

Engineer Picks Flaws.
In the first place, he has suggested too many engines as the capacity of the wheel.
Thirty-six would be the limit. The tracks would have to converge in such a manner that two could not be accommodated in a section. This would lessen the possibility of making such use of the wheel.

Will Need Turntable.
Again, the whole suggestion for a movable rim is idle as doing away with a turntable. It would mean that if twenty or twenty-five engines were in the house and room had to be made for another, these engines, weighing 2,000 or 2,500 tons, would have to be moved to make way for it. There could be no economy in such expenditure of force.

Then, as to a central machine and repair shop, such a shop would be just where the machinist does not want it. At the front of the locomotive, as it stands in its stall, are the machinist’s bench and tools. At the tender end of the machine is a passage way from one stall to another. For a machinist to have to take out a cylinder at the front of the engine and carry it back to a repair shop seventy or eighty feet away would be absurd.

As to the wheel’s making the largest roundhouse in the world is not true. The Burlington roundhouse at Western avenue is 280 feet in diameter, and yet will accommodate but forty engines. Every year the rallroad locomotive is getting bigger and bigger. A stall seventy feet long is necessary to house it properly. In the Western avenue house the turntable in the center is sixty feet long.

Roof Would Be Needed.
But, granting that the framework of the Ferris wheel is all that could be desired for a roundhouse, the advantages that it would offer are small. Steel construction is valuable largely for its capacity in carrying up walls, and the walls of the ordinary roundhouse are not more than eighteen or twenty feet high. They can be run up in ordinary brick with every advantage. When the walls are up, only the roof is necessary. Estimating the cost of moving the wheel. It can be compared to bridgework of similar kind. To overhaul a bridge costs about six-tenths of a cent a pound. The wheel weighs 2,400,000 pounds, and to get the framework of the building in place would cost $1,440, to say nothing of the first cost of the steel.

Mr. Fergus has a great idea. It is quite possible to make a roundhouse of the wheel as he proposes. But only its novelty would appeal to a railroad company in need of a roundhouse—a novelty that would have to be paid for, with little gain in advertising to compensate.

The Ferris wheel, like the Great Eastern, which lald the first Atlantic cable, was virtually useless when the purpose for which it was built was met. As an attraction to the north of Lincoln Park it has not been a paying venture.

The wheel is 250 feet in diameter and weighs 1,200 tons. Its axle of steel is thirty-two inches in diameter and forty-five feet long. The wheel is thirty feet thick, and for this reason would raise the wall of a possible roundhouse to nearly twice the necessary height.

Chicago Tribune, April 9, 1902

If negotiations now in progress are successful the Ferris Wheel will be transported from the park in North Clark street to Coney Island, where it will be operated by a stock company.

Former Judge William A. Vincent, who is a stockholder in the company which now controls the wheel, said last night that a New York company has been given an option on the big mass of iron. The Eastern company even has gone so far as to advertise the wheel as a prospective attraction at Coney Island.

“We have given the option to an Eastern company and we anticipate an acceptance,” said Mr. Vincent. ” However. I am not prepared to say whether the wheel will be moved this year or not. It cannot be an attraction in the East this season, as nearly six months will be required to take it down, and set it up again in Coney Island. The removal will cost in the neighborhood of $150,000, and the money has yet to be raised. It is to interest capital in the venture. I believe that the company is advertising the wheel in the New York papers before the deal is closed.”

The big wheel was taken from its place in the Midway shortly after the World’s Fair closed and was moved to Ferris Wheel Park, in North Clark street, where it since has been operated in the summer season. A few years ago it was proposed to move the structure to Coney Island, but the expense was then considered too great. Later it was said that the wheel would be torn down and sold for junk.

Inter Ocean, June 7, 1903

FERRIS WHEEL BRINGS $8,150.
Relic of World’s Fair Days Will Go to Dealers in Junk.
The Ferris wheel was sold yesterday morning in Judge Chytraus’ court. Anxious buyers forced the price quickly up from $1,850, which was bid early in the week, and the structure was finally knocked down, to the Chicago House Wrecking company for $8,150. The bid was final and completes the sale of the machine that has been in the hands of the court for the last two years. A bond of $10,000 to insure tbe removsl of the wheel will be given.

The wheel was placed in the bands of Receiver Luther V. Rice two years ago, and since then efforts bave been made to conduct the business on a paying basis. The wheel has not been a paying proposition since the World’s fair, when it yielded a revenue of 200 per cent to investors. In 1901 the wheel was removed from Jackson park to 1844 North Clark street, north of Lincoln park. The cost of tbe removal is said to have been 185,000.

Inter Ocean. October 8, 1903

The Ferris Wheel to Go.
If we had not so recently passed through one of those enchanting spectacles for which we are becoming famous—if our ears were not still filled with the notes of martial music; if our eyes were not still suffering from the glare and glamour of the decorated streets and the1 soul-racking attack upon Fort Dearborn; if our thoughts were not still reverting sadly to the marvelous Indian exhibit in Lincoln park—if, in a word, we were only fully recovered from the effects of our magnificent centennial festival, we might now be reaching out for another large consignment of half-rate excursionists to join with us in celebrating the departure of the Ferris wheel.

For the Ferris wheel is to leave us. It is going to be set up on The Pike of the St. Louis exposition. Instead of overlooking North Clark street and the limits barns, as for the last seven or eight years, it will soon be overlooking the Catlin tract and the Skinker road.

And we shall miss it. Its removal will be the severing of another of those ties that have bound us to a happy past. One by one the mementos and monument of our White City are passing away. Christopher Columbus lies wrapped in his fur-lined overcoat in the Washington park junk yard, and now the Ferris wheel is going to St. Louis and eventually to the scrap heap. Thus the joys of life are fleeting. Every well-regulated memory in this beautiful Westland must revert at the announcement of this transfer to those halcyon days when the Ferris wheel, freighted with youth, beauty, and old age, revolved for fourteen hours every day half-way up the Midway; to the days when all the nations of the earth in miniature were spread out like the patches of a crazy quilt, in birdseye perspective, before the occupants of the cars in the huge machine as it gracefully swung around upon its mighty axle When—

When they beheld—
Kiosks, turrets, mosques, and domes,
Huts from Hindustan,
Temple towers and Malay homes.

Tribes from the Soudan.
Denmark. Sweden, Switzerland
Down there to the right
England. Russia, France, and Spain—
All the world in sight.

It is really too bad that because of our recent exhausting efforts to entertain the strangers attracted to our city, we should not be able to organize pageant in celebration of the departure or the Ferris wheel. No doubt we might get up a farewell festival at trifling cost as many of the fall festival and centennial decorations could be used over again, but, as remarked before, we are not as yet recovered sufficiently even to think about it.

However, if the wheel shall not be removed for a month or two we may feel more like entering upon another round of delirious pleasure than we do now.

St. Louis Dispatch, May 14, 1905

St. Louis Dispatch, January 4, 1906

The Ferris Wheel, the engineering marvel of two world’s fairs, on which six million have ridden, including representatives of every clime and every nation, made its last revolution and carried its last passengers at 4 p.m. yesterday.

When the skeleton of “The Roosevelt,” the last car remaining in position, had been carried slowly around the rim of the huge wheel, bearing three persons, it was taken off, ending the career of the wheel as a vehicle for sight-seeing.

Within a month it will be pulled from its bearings and roll from its framework and go crashing to the earth and be broken into junk.

The passengers on the last trip were W. G. Bennett, Superintendent of the Chicago House Wrecking Co., F. H. Burgess, representative of a Kansas City engine company, and a reporter.

It was exactly 4 o’clock when the three stepped on the platform of the car, from which the roof and sides had been removed, and took their positiions in the center.

The Last Revolution.
“Let ‘er go,” Mr. Bennett shouted to the engineer. The engine, somewhat asthmatic from long exposure to the elements, wheezed and snorted, and the wheel started with a jerk which at set the platform to swaying. The huge chains cracked on the sprockets and a moan as of protest, came from the bearings as the great axle began to revolve.

Mr. Bennett viewed the behavior of the mechanism with professional interest not unmixed with a sort of parental sentiment, for he had superintended the taking down of the wheel in Chicago and its setting up in St. Louis and knew all its parts and all its moods. He had ridden on it when it made its last revolution in Chicago and regarded it with feelings akin to affection.

He walked to the edge of the platform began to ascend and made a quick, keen survey of the structure to see that everything was all right. Since the close of the World’s Fair, over a year ago, it had not carried passengers on its grand circuit, and he wanted to be sure that the mechanism had not developed any crankiness during its long rest.

“It’s working as nicely as it ever did,” he said, with a tinge of pride in his tones, “but the engine will have a hard time pulling us around with the steam it has.”

There was a little hitch, which set the platform again to swaying, but Bennett only laughed.

“Many’s the time I’ve crawled up that rim,” he said by way of conveying that making the ascent on a teetering platform was tame business.

Car Crept Up Slowly.
Very slowly the car crept toward the summit of the wheel. Bennett stopped watching the wheel itself to take a survey of the work of destruction of the magnificent picture on which close to 2,000,000 persons looked down during the Louisiana Purchase Expositiin.

“You can see from here,” he said, “how well advanced the work of demolishing the Fair has progressed.”

The car was approaching the apex of the wheel, 265 feet from the ground. Bennett walked to the edge of of the platform again and looked down through the iron network. “This is the only place,” he said, “where you can get an adequate idea of the huge size of the structure.”

“Now we are at the top,” he said, coming back to the center of the platform,. and the three passengers in the instant took the last look over the fair and park and city and the hazy landscape beyond that will ever be taken from the dying as the day was dying and silence top of this Ferris Wheel.

The three passengers were silent as the platform swung out and down on the westward side. The old wheel was fitting.

Trip Occupied Eight Minutes.
The chains creaked dolefully over the sprockets as the platform settled into place and the great wheel came to its last stop. The trip had occupied eight minutes.

Bennett, was the superintendent again.

“Take it down,” he ordered, the men who were standing ready, and they began to displace the car.

Bennett did not look back as he walked toward his buggy and he was thoughtful as he drove back toward the office.

The platform on which the last trip was made was known as “The Roosevelt” during the Fair, because it was the one in which Alice Roosevelt and a party of her friends made the circuit of the wheel when she visited Miss Irene Catlin and saw the Fair. It was also the car in which all the marriage ceremonies, upwards of fifty, which took place on the wheel, were solemnized.

Just before the final trip was taken Mr. Bennett took four brave girls from the offices of the company on a partial revolution of the wheel. They wanted to go all the way round, but he was reluctant to take the responsibility and had to refuse them. They were Misses Gertrude Jacobs, Millie Allina, Marie Gerwe and Hilda Herminhaus.

The Ferris Wheel was to the Chicao and St. Louis fairs what the Eiffel Tower was to the Paris Exposition. It spread the fame of its designer and builder. George Washington Ferris of Chicago, to the ends of the earth.

An Engineering Wonder.
It was the crowning engineering wonder of the Chicago Exposition and was brought to the St. Louis Exposition because nothing more wonderful could be devised.

The great wheel, still in position, but now stripped of all the cars, is 250 feet in diameter. It weighs 5,000 tons. It was constructed and erected at the Chicago Fair within six months, the work of making the parts being distributed among a number of foundries. Notwithstanding that it was not ready for the opening of the Fair, there and was only operated 100 days, it was a tremendous popular and financial success.

It earned $750,000 which it had cost to to build it and earned close to 100 per cent in the investment.

At the close of the Chicago Fair a company was organized to operate it and it was removed to Lincoln Park. But it never made money there. It finally went into the hands of a receiver. The Chicago Wrecking Co. bought it for $15,000, intending to wreck it, but decided to bring it to St. Louis, which they did at a coast of $20,000.

Over three million persons rode on it at the Chicago Fair and probably a million rode on it during the years that it was at Lincoln Park. At St. Louis the number was close to 2,000,000 and it earned 20 per cent on the investment.

Altogether there has been expended on the wheel, in building and moving it, over the $1,200,000.

Carried $30,000 One Day.
On Chicago Day at the Columbian Exposition, the wheel carried 30,000 persons. St. Louis Day at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition it carried 11,000. It was capable of carrying 2,150 at a revolution and has often carried that number.

On the first revolution it ever made the passengers were Mr. and Mrs. Ferris and a party of friends, who christened it. On its last revolution in Chicago the passengers were Mr.Bennett, Abraham Harris, president of the wrecking company, and a few others.

After the close of the Fair here it was thought that the wheel would be taken to some amusement resort, but the cost of moving it precluded this, and its end will be the scrap heap.

It is to be taken down by constructing a runway, sawing the bearings and starting it with ropes and an engine. It is expected to roll out of the framework and topple over and be broken up while prostrate.

LEFT:

RIGHT:

Chicago Tribune May 12, 1906

Blown to pieces by a monster charge of dynamite. the Ferris wheel cane to an ignominious end yesterday at St. Louis, attar a varied career of thirteen years. At its ending it was unwept and unsung.

Constructed as one of the engineerIng feats of a century, the wheel first was a feature of the Chlcago world s fair In 1893.

Then for a long period of monumental and unprofitable inactivity it towered in an amusement park at North Clark street and Wrlghtwood avenue. It finally was removed to St. Louis to form for the second time the huge mechanical marvel of a great exposition.

For more than a month heavy wagons laden with the 4,600 tons of steel entering into its constructIon lumbered through Chicago’s streets.

Giant Wheel Fights for Life.
The old wheel, which bad become St. Louis’ white elephant, died hard. It required 200 pounds of dynamite to put it out of business. The first charge was exploded under the supports at the north side of the structure, wrecking its foundation and permitting the wheel to drop to the ground, a matter of but a few feet.

As the wheel settled it slowly turned, with its bottom as a support, and then after tottering a moment like a huge giant in distress, it collapsed, slowly. It did not fall to one side, as the wreckers planned—it merely crumpled up slowly. Within a few minutes it was a tangled mass of steel and iron thirty or forty feet high,

The huge axle, weighing seventy-four tons, dropped slowly with the remnants of the wheel, crushing the smaller braces and steel frame work. When the mass stopped settling it bore no resemblance to the wheel which was so familiar to Chicago and St. Louis and to 7,500,000 amusement seekers from all over the world, who, in the days when it was In operation, made the trip to the top of its heighth of 264 feet and then slowly around and down to the starting point.

Following the blast that wrecked the wheel, but which failed to shatter its foundations, came an explosion of another charge of 100 pounds of dynamite. The sticks were sunk in holes drilled in the concrete foundations that supported the pillars on the north side of the wheel.

Ferris Wheel After Demolition.

Wonder of Two Continents.
The wheel Was the wonder or two continents, by reason of its cost of $360,000, its dimensions, and Its utter uselessness. It was the rival of the Eiffel tower of Paris. Chicago was glad to get rid of it, and St. Louis is said to have witnessed its destruction with satisfaction.

George Washington Gale Ferris, president of a Pittsburg engineering firm, originated the idea of the wheel that bore his name, taking the notion from a bicycle and adapting the constructive principles of in its erection.

Ferris financed the wheel, built it in Pittsburg. erected it at the Chicago Columbian exposition, and took in $750,000 at 50 cents a ride. Then Ferris took a kaleidoscope trip to Europe. Later he lost all interest in the monster, and died on Pittsburg of tuberculosis. He was only 40 years old.

The stockholders, who had made 100 per cent profit out of the wheel in 1893, later leased the ground in North Clark street a short distance north of Wrightwood avenue, and re-erected it there. Ferris wheel park Was not a success, and the wheel was taken down again and removed to St. Louis on. June 3, 1903. The cost of taking down the wheel was $40,000. Its ruins are estimated as worth $8,000 as scrap iron.

1886—Streeterville

Notorious Chicago

agatite

Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1890

Trial Over a Skipper’s Home.
There is a civil suit in Justice Going’s court which is both novel and interesting. George Streeter, an old sea captain, was arrested on a writ of forcible detainer sworn by N. K. Fairbank. It seems that Streeter was the skipper of a schooner which three years ago stranded near the shore directly off the foot of Superior street and the lake. All efforts to get the boat to float again proved futile, and the heavy surf scraped its keel upon the rocks and sand until it spring a leak and floundered. It was allowed to remain where it was, and Streeter took up his abode on it with his wife and family. But soon the need for new land necessitated the filling in of the lake to widen the possessions of N. K. Fairbank, who now wishes through the aid of the law to dispossess the defendant of his property. Streeter demanded a trial, and a jury was selected. The case was continued until this morning at 10 o’clock.

Inter Ocean, September 9, 1890

HIS NOVEL ABODE
George Streeter, on old sea captain, was arrested on a writ of forcible detainer sworn out by N. K. Fairbank. Streeter was the skipper of a schooner which three years ago stranded near the shore directly off the foot of Superior street in the lake. All efforts to get the boat to float again proved futile, and the heavy surf scraped her keel upon the rocks and sand until she sprung a leak and floundered. She was allowed to remain where she was, and Streeter took up his abode on her with his family. The ice and snow of two winters have been fairly well resisted by the old hull and the old couple were comparatively contented in their novel home. But soon the need for new land necessitated the filling in of the lake not for World’s Far purposes, but to widen the possessions of N. K. Fairbank, who owns the land fronting on the lake shore for quite a distance along there. At least it was filled in quite up to the sunken home of the Streeter family. N. K. Fairbank now wishes through the aid of the law to dispossess the defendant of his property.

Streeter was in court yesterday and appeared to take a peculiar delight in telling of that awful night when his vessel went down. He demanded a trial and a jury selected. The case was to have been tried at 4 o’clock, but was continued until this morning at 10 o’clock.

Streeter claims that he does not trespass upon the riparian rights of Mr. Fairbank. His boat is directly at the foot of Superior street, and therefore, he maintains, the riparian rights belong to the city of Chicago.

Top map shows the shoreline in 1879. Below, the 1886 Robinson Fire Map showing approximately where Streeter’s boat went aground on July 10, 1886, which would be the corner of Fairbanks and Superior streets today. In 1907 the tiny street called Fairbanks Court was named after Nathaniel Fairbank, the original owner of the land where Streeter’s boat landed. The neighborhood Streeterville consists of about 186 acres.

Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1890

Nathaniel K. Fairbank won his suit of forcible detainer against Capt. George Streeter yesterday afternoon, but Capt. George W. Streeter was still detaining the shanty at the foot of Superior street last night. He intends to detain it lawfully until the Superior Court of the State of Illinois undertakes to put him out, and then he will detain it otherwise—namely; with a shotgun, with a white bulldog, and a stout heart withal.

“If the State ever puts me out,” says Capt. Streeter, “I’ll make the Government put the State out.”

“Faith we’ll do worse nor that,” said Mrs. Streeter, “we’ll sit Shpot on it.”

Spot is the white white bulldog. If Spot ever fastens his teeth in the leg of the State of Illinois, the State of Illinois will limp forever afterward.

Spot lay asleep under the table in Capt. Streeter’s home last night. It was thick outside, and The Trbune reporter who was sent over to the North Side to talk to the bold mariner who has been fighting millionaires and is only waiting for bigger game stumbled into the cabin before he knew he had arrived. In the daytime the shanty is not so hard to find. Anybody who wants to go down to the foot of Superior street by daylight in summer can see the shanty of Olaf Larsen. In the winter, they are so deep under snow that the pieces of stovepipe which serves the chimneys are just visible. Mr. Larsen’s has the street front. In fact, it has the street itself, for it projects clear out onto the roadway. Capt. Streeter’s is next door. It is a good-sized scow about thirty feet long. It has the ground for a foundation, and it is roofed in with oak planks well tarred by the Captain’s skillful hand. There is a back porch where the prow of the scow used to be, and the front entrance, which will overlook Sheridan drive, is reached through a hole in the stern. This is no caprice of the Captain. It is the way the boat landed when a storm rolled it ashore two years ago. That is where the story comes in.

“I’ve been a sailor man for twenty-five years,” the Captain said last night. He was in the one living room of the scow and his wife was frying sausage on the stove. Some friends of the Captain were sitting about smoking corn-cob pipes, and a lamp withiut a chimney was also smoking. Capt. Cuttle might have lived in this room. It smelled deliciously of tar and oakum, not to speak of the sausage, which was no small item, and it was hung around with yellow sou’westers, and canvas jackets, and long rubber boots. The dog was asleep under the chair.

“I’ve been a sailor-man for twenty-five years,” said the Captain, jamming his tobacco into his pipe with his thumb, which is a trick all seamen know, “an’ my name is G. W. Streeter.”

“George Wellington Streeter,” said Mrs. Streeter.

“But I’m no Englisher.”

“‘Dade ye ain’t, or ye’d niver ‘v marrid me,” said Mrs. Streeter.

“‘Vast,” said the Captain. “I’ve been a sailor-man for twenty-five years. I sailed the steamer Catherine to South Chicago until she went ashore at Grosse Point. I was in the Missi’ppi until I sold the boat to a man in Kans’ City, who never paid me.”

“The thafe,” said Mrs. Streeter.

He Likes the Location.
“Vast,” said the Captain.

“I allus lived ‘board a boat. I ain’t used to livin’ nowhere else. I built the Routan—shw was sloop-rigged—an’ sailed her round for a sort of pleasure yacht for people till she was div’ ashore by nor’east blow about three years ago this time. Blowed me into four feet of water and pounded me into the sand. When the wind fell I looked around me and sez I: ‘I’ll stop here,’ I sez. I didn’t have money enough to get the boat off, an’ I liked the location. It was ten or fifteen rods from shore an’ I had a small boat to pull in an’ do my tinkerin’ aland. Nobody raised no objections then an’ we lived quite comfortable an’ easy. About two years ago there was another blow, an’ one night it comes this here old tub an’ stuck about one hundred an’ fifty feet from shore. She was bigger’n the ‘Routan,’ an’ I moved into her.”

“More commodious,” said Mrs. Streeter.

“Vast,”said the Captain. “I put on a roof an’ tarred it, an’ me an’ the girl lived here since. When they began to fill up the lake I didn’t say nuthin’ until it come they had filled 400 feet from the old water line. Then the dudes said I had their ripearian rights. They ordered me off. I wouldn’t go. They asked the Health Department to fire me, an’ I fired the Health Department. They sent the Harbor-Master to put me off an’ that didn’t work. Mr. Fairbank, he said he’d burn me down and I said I’d shoot Mr. Fairbank’s whiskers off if he tried it. I would, too. Then Mr. Fairbank came in his carriage one day an’ he was howlin’ mad. I sez, sez I:

“Mr. Fairbank, you look here. I’m an American citizen an’ you can’t come no British Lord business me. An’ moreover, Mr. Fairbank, you can’t work no Johnny Bull on me, because I was born in Michigan, an’ your ripearian rights is nothin’ to me, Mr. Fairbank.”

“Our rights is more riper than his; more by token that we was here first,” said Mrs. Streeter.

Is Going to Defend His Rights.
“Vast,” said the Captain. “An’ I’m goin’ to defend my rights. I’m goin’ to carry it up to the Circuit Court an’ to the App’late Court an’ to the Soopreme Court, an’ if the Soopreme Court tries to hist me there’s my Government papers to run a boat, an’ if Uncle Sam don’t fight ’em off this ain’t no land of freedom.”

“It’s unconstitutional,” said a man with earrings, rising to spit into the cook-stove.

“It ain’t roight,” said Mrs. Streeter.

“Vast,” said the Captain, snd he rose and took down from the wall a long-barreled shotgun unpleasantly loaded with ten-penny nails and aroused the dog.

He Has Aristocratic Neighbors.
The home is situated in an aristocratic neighborhood. Many prominent men are neighbors of the Captain, From his front window he can hear the boom of the lake and see the breakers piling in ashore. From his back stoop he can watch the carriages of the haughty in the distance. He has only to turn over in bed to hear the chimes of St. James’. The Newberry library will stand within hailing distance of his cook-stove. Moreover, the made land which he lays claim to is worth many hundreds of thousands.

No wonder he doesn’t want to move.

Inter Ocean, March 30, 1892

Forty acres of the choicest residence property in Chicago, embracing 10,400 feet of frontage on parks, boulevards and connecting streets, of a total value of more than $8,000,000, have been purchased and otherwise acquired by Chicago and outside capitalists by concerted action.

The land is bounded as follows:

Pine street

The securing of this great tract of land has been the work of many months. Every now and then a transfer has gone on record, showing that something was happening. Others will follow. One, involving the sale of $350,000 worth of the property noted, will be filed for record tomorrow. Two weeks ago The Inter Ocean published an article detailing the operations of the Pine Street Land Association, a syndicate formed to purchase and sell land in this locality. It is this syndicate, another since formed, and private parties acting with these three associations, that have secured control of the property described.

Some Weeks Ago
the North Park Board, acting with owners of property having the riparian right on lake shore frontage between Oak and Indiana streets, completed negotiations whereby the Lake Shore drive was to be extended in a southeasterly direction, on a line about 1.000 feet east of the then shore line. By the terms of the agreement between the park board and owners, the board acquired 202 feet of right of way, wit the riparion right outside of the outer line. The property owners, in addition to donating the right of way, agreed to the following:

To do all the filing between the shore line and the outer line of the drive and construct the breakwater; to pay an assessment of $100 per running foot for the surface improvement of the drive, and deed fifty feet in width, from Oak to Pearson street, for the widening of Pine street.

For these concessions the board, on its part, deeded to the property owners the right of the State if Illinois to be submerged land between the inner line, thereby perfecting titles in this territory. The board further agreed to maintain the drive as a part of Lincoln Park; to improve as a park the land lying between the water-works, and the drive; to boulevard Pine street as far south as the water-works, and to improve certain property opposite Oak street as a part of the drive.

By These Agreements,
reference to the map to the map will show that a tract of land containing about forty acres is isolated absolutely from anything but the choicest surroundings. Parks and boulevards bound tye land on all sides. That the best use might be made of this property and everything objectionable nature be barred, what amounts to one management has secured control of the entire property.

Two syndicates have been formed to handle property in this territory with the Chicago Title and Trust Company as trustee. A third is in process of formation. An executive committee handles the affairs of each syndicate, and these committees will act together in whatever relates to the improvement of the land.

Such land as is not owned by the syndicate is principally owned by General Charles Fitz Simons and Henry N. Cooper, who are members of the executive committees and largely interested in the syndicates.

The ownerships in the tract, representing the result of all recent purchases and trades, are as follows:

The ownership of Lake Shore drive, corners as follows:

Charles Fitz Simons, Oak and Chestnut streets corners; Lake Shore Drive Association, Delaware place corners; Henry N. Cooper, Walton place and Chestnut and Pearson streets corners.

Never before in the history of any American city has such an opportunity been offered as that now before the management of this property. Forty acres of a absolutely the choicest residence land in the city will be brought into existence as virgin territory. With no present improvement, either good or bad to hinder development, the opportunity offers to create a residence district which will be the pride of the city. Among the features which the management of the property should introduce will be such restrictions as will completely bar every thoroughfare to trade traffic. There should be no alleys. A uniform building line should be established for every frontage. No house should be built to cost less than a minimum sum. No cross streets should be allowed. For the convenience of residents one or two paved lanes mighht be run through the center of the long blocks. All streets should be asphalted, and all other street improvements should be uniform.

It may be stated that while the management of this propert has not fully formulated a scheme of improvement, the importance of preserving the high character for the land is recognized. Prompt action will be necessary, particularly in regard to whatever restrictions are to be placed on purchasers. A number of persons desiring to purchase lots for building have been asked to wait until the plan of improvement

Has Been Decided Upon.
No sales will be closed until all details have been perfected, but from present inquiry it is doubtful if any land will be unsold three months from now. The values of the property when improved with houses of the cost designated by such as have expressed a wish to purchase will be largely above and $10,000,000.

These operations present an object lesson in Chicago values that should educate any doubting Easterner. The land a few years ago was comparatively valueless. It would still be of minimum worth were it not for the amicable arrangement with the Park Board. This means warring interests have been harmonized, and titkes, elsewise defective, perfected.

The Inter Ocean, November 18, 1892

Nathianel K. Fairbank filed an answer before Judge Collins yesterday to the suit involving a controversy over land bordering on Lake Michigan at the foot of Superior street. Capt. Streeter is seeking to enjoin Mr. Fairbank from interfering with his possession of the land. Mr. Fairbank says that in the sporing of 1889 Streeter called upon him and stated that he had been notified by the city authorities to remove his boat from Superior street; that he was repairing his boat and getting ready to go away. He asked Mr. Fairbank for permission to move his boat on his land until he could get ready to move. This permission was granted, but Streeter declined to move. Neighbors complained that Streeter and his wife were disorderly, and that the residence there was a nuisance. Finally he ordered, says Mr. Fairbank, his agents to begin litigation to oust Streeter from the property.

In an affidavit Henry Russer, of 214 Rush street, says:

In the summer of the year 1890 Streeter came to me and asked me if I had any money. He said he knew of a scheme which would make himself and myself worth $1,000,000 each. I asked him what the scheme was. He then told me, and requested me to regard it as confidential, that he intended to claim the land by reason of squatting upon it. He said he intended to fight it out; that he was a lawyer himself and that if I would furnish the money with which to fight it we would share equally. I told Streetr that I regarded the scheme crooked and upbraided him fior repaying Mr. Fairbank kindness to him in allowing him to remain on the land, After that time I refused to have anything to do with Streeter.

Captain George and Ma Streeter

Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1894

Attorney-General Moloney Monday morning will be asked to add a few more defendants to the list named in his bill to restrain the building of the Lake-Shore drive and the reclamation of submerged lands adjacent. Attorney Francis E. Burton, who will preside the reasons for such action, will name among the additional defendants is the United States of America and a number of persons to whom Capt. George W. Streeter of Lake Shore fame has transferred lots. In the maps, plats, abstracts, and other papers which Mr. Burton will show copious references to Capt. Streeter and Peter J. Johnson will appear; for not withstanding his long litigation in courts, the Captain stil claims a big chunk of property adjacent to the drive. In fact, he says, he and Johnson claim all the land from Chicago avenue to the North Pier lying east of a line east of St. Clair street. The Captian has located the land in soldiers’ warrants issued for fighting in 1812. He wants to be one of the defendants, he says. He doesn’t care for the suit, he declares, nor the Attorney-General, nor the courts, the City of Chicago, nor anybody else as far as his claims to the land are concerned. He is outside of Chicago, he says, and gets his title from the United States Government.

Attorney Burton’s Claim.
Attorney Burton, who represents persons to whom Streeter has conveyed lots, says his clients are only seeking to have cognizance taken of all interests. In real estate circles the assertion is made that the move means that a new party plans to join the forthcoming fought for lands worth millions and in it Ed Partridge, the Board of Trade speculator is interested.

Nov. 6, 1893, Capt. Streeter recorded a soldier’s warrant issued to John Scott, private in a Maryland regiment, April 1, 1832, for his services in the early wars of the republic. The warrant entitled Scott to locate forty acres of land. It appeared to have been transferred to Streeter by Lewis H. Van Diver, administrator of Scott. It was a seamed and battered document, full of erasures, and dim with age, but the Recorder recorded it and the Captain, it develops, immediately proceeded to locate that forty acres of ground 451 feet east of St Clair street, between Chicago avenue and Erie street. The Captain got another warrant or two and under them located the rest of the land between these boundaries, basing his claim on the early maps of the government, showing the meander line of the lake.

Peter Johnson has lived south of Erie street near the lake shore for many years, and he, it is said, has laid claim to the ground south of the line Streeter fixes in his map and north of the north pier. Johnson has had some litigation, but has not figured to the extent that the Captain has in the courts. Not withstanding the celebrity that the latter has attained through suits, the transaction above described appears not to have attracted extensive notice.

Has Already Sold Lots.
The Captain has platted his land and he says he sold 200 lots. One of the buyers is a man named William H. Cox. He wrote to the General Land Office at Washington in October, 1893, making application to purchase 130 acres of land, which he described as lying on the lake front in front of the government meander line of fractional sections 3 and 10. Twonship 39, North, Range 14, East. The particular parcel of land he wanted, he said, had not been surveyed, and he inclosed $162.50 as the price of that 130 acres and asked the government to direct an official survey.

Commissioner Lamoreaux wrote Cox a coldly informal letter, setting out that the official plat on file, approved March 16, 1831, showed no such unsurveyed land and that any land formed in front in front of the meander line since the survey did not belong to the United States. He sent Cox back his $162.50 and referred him to the decision of the Supreme Court in the Illinois Central case, reported in No. 146, United States Reports. The syllabus of that decision, he wrote, was that the ownership of lands covered by tidewaters within the several States belonged to the respective States in which they were found with the right to dispose of any portion thereof, when that can be done without the impairment of the interest of the public in the waters. The same doctrine as to dominion and sovereignty over an ownership of land under the navigable waters of the great lakes applied which obtained at common law as to tidewaters.

Notwithstanding this letter, Attorney Burton says that there has not been anything produced to show that the lands do not belong to the United States.

Burton speaks for Streeter, said he:

Capt. Streeter. I understand, has a soldier’s warrant and has located his land and had it recorded. The decision of the Supreme Court in his case, I am told, is not a final disposition of his case. But whether it was or not the Captain now claims to have a title directly from the United States. I represented parties who have bought lots from him and we contend that the United States is interested in this Lake Shore drive matter. The maps of 1818 fix the boundary line of Illinois on the western shores of Lake Michigan. The State of Illinois has no right to any land added to that on the lake side by the action of the waters otherwise. The United States has absolute control of the land under the waters of the lake. The title is still vested to the United States; the State has nothing to do with it. I have suggested to the Attorney General that all the parties interested should be made defendants, the United States included.

“Your clients don’t want to get into the case to get a quasi recognition of their claims, do they?

No, sir, nothing of the kind. I had a long talk with the Attorney General. He doesn’t think that the Pine Street Land Association people have any right to the property, and he wants to hear what claim Streeter has. In the interest of justice all should be included.

Capt. Streeter has an office on the thirteenth floor of the Title and Trust Building. He sat in it yesterday the center of a group of seven or eight men.

Capt. Streeter Independent.
“Are you going into this Lake Shore drive litigation, Captain?” he was asked.

“No, sir. I don’t care for a cent for this litigation. I care nothing for Moloney or anybody else. I and Johnson are the only people owning that property, and we’ll hold it. I have already sold 200 lots in my subdivision.”

“Is your map on file at the City Hall, Captain”

“I have all the maps there I need or am going to have. I am outside the City of Chicago. I got my title from the government, The city has got nothing to do with me and I don’t want to have anythibg to do with the city.”

Representatives of the Pine Street Land Association ridicule the claims of Streeter and Johnson. Streeter’s claim, they say, has been settled by the Supreme Court. The Scott warrant, under which he located forty acres, they say, is full of flaws and will never stand a judicial examination. H. N. Cooper says that Streeter has been making transfers, but he alleges no great amount of money has passed. A man very well informed in the whole matter said yesterday:

I have the best reason for knowing Ed Pardridge has become interested with these people. He thinks enough of their case to get hold of immensely valuable property to put up money fpr them. This he has done and plenty of it.

Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1894

The Government Map of Shore of Lake Michigan and Harbor Soundings Made in 1892.

Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1899

On the afternoon of May 8, 1899, the capitol of “the District of Lake Michigan” was ruthlessly razed to the ground by the employees of N. K. Fairbank. Not only the capitol building itself, but all Streeterville was utterly destroyed, and one shingle was not allowed to rest upon another. This was done under guard of Chicago police officers and private watchmen employed by the Newberry library. N. K. Fairbank and John V. Farwell, who claim to own the land and who have paid taxes on it for many years.

Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1900

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A map of Chicago’s Twenty-fourth Ward depicting the District of Illinois formed by Captain Streeter’s lodged boat.

Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1901

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Armed with a permit signed by Building Commissioner Kiolbassa and Cornelius O’Shea, Captain George Wellington Streeter erected a shack in the District of Lake Michigan on Thursday night, and now the residents of the Lake Shore drive are wondering whether Captain Streeter will move into the building, which is between Walton and Delaware places, where they end at the Ohio street boulevard extension.

This flank movement of the Captain was explained yesterday by the police, who said, “somebody” had a regularly signed permit, which had been applied for by Alderman Cullerton.

The house was occupied yesterday by Billy McManners, one of Streeter’s lieutenants. The furniture consisted of one cook stove, three sections of rusty stovepipe, and two wooden kitchen chairs. According to McManners, the house was erected in two hours and ten minutes, having been brought to the site selected in six sections and then hastily thrown together. Later it was learned it was the same house which Captain Streeter attempted to erect at Superior street two months ago.

The first house to be erected in Streeterville.

Chicago Sunday Tribune September 5,1937

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The shore line of Chicago’s near north side was approximately where it is shown in the above drawing on July 10, 1886, when Cap’n George Wellington Streeter’s pleasure boat, the Reutan, went aground to mark the birth of a real estate controversy that raged for forty years, an aftermath of which still is pending in court.

• Streeterville, or, as Cap’n Streeter called it, “the Deestrict of Lake Michigan,” over which the dispute was carried on, contained approximately 186 acres, and is shown in the drawing as that part of Lake Michigan that has boundaries and streets outlined in broken white lines.

• Every one familiar with the latter history of Chicago remembers the doughty old Cap’n Streeter and the lake front property, which he contended, on the basis of a number of claims, was rightfully his. Streeterville now is built up largely with costly and imposing structures, such as Northwestern university’s McKinlock campus buildings, Passavant Memorial hospital, and the Lake Shore Athletic club, and Cap’n Streeter has been dead more than sixteen years. But heirs of the old man still have a suit pending in the United States District Court in Chicago. They are trying to collect damages from present owners of property in Streeterville, an area the value of which eight years ago was estimated as high as 800 million dollars.

Streeter was a picturesque old fellow. He served in the Civil War, became a showman, a steamboat operator, and a country fair faker. In the spring of 1886 he built and launched in Chicago a small boat which he called the Reutan. He had planned to employ this vessel in river passenger service somewhere in the west with the idea of obtaining as a reward land grants from the government. As his plans were taking form, however, he put the craft into service on Lake Michigan, making trips to Milwaukee and other nearby ports. On July 10, 1886, according to his own story, he took a private party to Milwaukee on the Reutan. A storm blew up and his passengers decided against the return trip to Chicago. Streeter, his wife, Maria, and his crew started back without the passengers. Years later Streeter’s experience on that eventful day was described in the following words:

It was about 10 o’clock at night when we drifted near the breakwater…We were then at the mercy of the wind and waves, helplessly drifting about. Fortunately or unfortunately, just as you may choose to judge by subsequent events, the wind drove us behind the breakwater, narrowly missing a collision with the pier. Just as soon as we were clear of this danger I cast anchor overboard, hoping to prevent the vessel from running aground on the beach. But the sea was so strong that it not only broke over the boat in tremendous waves, but it also dragged the anchor across the bottom of the lake, which at that point was not very deep.

The boat finally stranded in a shallow body of water when 451 feet from the shore.

Although reports have varied as to the exact spot where Streeter’s boat went aground, some placing it as far north as the foot of Oak Street and others near the pier just north of the mouth of the Chicago River, it is generally believed that the actual spot of the grounding was off the foot of Superior Street, just east of St. Clair Street.

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In the foreqround is Streeterville as it appears today (1937).

It always was Streeter’s contention that his vessel sank in very shallow water and that the action of the waves built an island around the craft, but another story is to the effect that he had his boat dragged into shore upon property owned by N. K. Fairbank, who, according to testimony at subsequent hearings in the controversy over the ownership of Streeterville land, ordered the Cap’n off time and time again.

At any rate, here was Streeter and his wife, living on a stranded boat in the fall of 1886, near the foot of Superior Street, the waves piling up sand around his curious dwelling. Land grew so rapidly that it was not long until a hundred acres of white sand had sprung up around the stranded boat. Streeter called this stretch of beach “District of Lake Michigan.” He pronounced it “Deestrict.” It was no part of Illinois, he said. “No, sir! It was a separate commonwealth under the direct jurisdiction of the federal government.” It was not until 1889 that physical efforts were mad to evict Cap’n. In July of that year Streeter and his valiant Maria, with loaded rifles, drove five constables out of the District of Lake Michigan.

According to the Cap’n’s story, he repaired the Reutan, refloated her in 1893, rechristened her the Maria, and used her in carrying passengers from the downtown district to the fair grounds on the south side. By that time he had converted an abandoned scow into a house, and in that he and Maria lived.

As this was transpiring a great building boom struck Chicago. There was much excavating necessary and contractors anxious to find dumping grounds close at hand. The waste of sand around Streeter’s scow was inviting, and lierally millions of tons of refuse, earth, and gravel were hauled to the spot. In fact, the Cap’n himself later said that a number of contractors paid him for the privilege of using the section as a dumping ground. Streeter combed the refuse for old iron, copper, and other junk. While the waste material piled up, the waves of the lake, trapped by the pier at the north of the river, brought in more land to add to Streeterville.

Property owners along the original lake shore saw Streeterville taking large proportions. On the basis of the fact that their deeds entitled them to their land to the very water’s edge, they held that this newly added land rightfully was theirs. Among these property owners were wealthy men, such as the previously mentioned Mr. Fairbank, Potter Palmer, and Gen. Charles Fitz-Simons. It should be borne in mind, however, that the Potter Palmer mansion in Lake Shore Drive, to the north, was not involved.

The controversy between Streeter and the property owners took on the form of prolonged warfare. To the banners of the Cap’n flocked an assortment of folk who wanted to see his wealthy opponents beaten. Streeter even organized an association and sold and leased lots. One William N. Niles was given by Streeter, or assumed on his own initiative, the title of “military governor of the District of Lake Michigan.” The belligerency of the Cap’n and his wife, Maria, began to share space in the newspapers with the legal aspects of the case. The property owners engaged batteries of lawyers, and Streeter marshaled his own legal corps. As attorneys wrangled over points of law, Streeter and his wife held forth with lethal weapons, ready upon a moment’s notice to pounce upon anyone found “trespaaaing” upon Streeterville. It was in 1899 that five policemen captured the Cap’n in an unguarded moment. As the bluecoats began to gloat over their feat a shower of boiling water descended upn them. Maria had seized a kettle and dashed to the rescue. In the confusion Streeter freed himself and grabbed his rifle.

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Captain and Ma Streeter.

During the following year several shots were fired within the dangerous precincts of the District. Once Samuel Avery tried to build a fence across the Cap’n’s deadline and was peppered with bird shot. A month later the military governor objected to the presence of Police Captain Barney Baer and two bullets were sent through the top of the policeman’s buggy. The next day 500 policemen surrounded the District. There was much maneuvering and skirmishing, and finally one lone Lincoln Park policemen captured Streeter’s entire army. All were acquitted.

The killing in Streeterville in 1902 of a man by the name of John Kirk brought Streeter and others before the courts to answer for the man’s death. Streeter finally was found guilty of manslaughter in connection with the case and, starting in February 1903, actually served several months in Joliet penitentiary before he was freed on habeas corpus proceedings. In the meanwhile, his wife, Maria, had died.
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In April, 1906, according to the Cap’n’s statement, he married Elma Lockwood, who ever after was known as “Ma” Streeter. He took her to live in a brick house that he had erected not a great distance from the site of the old scow.

Three years later the old fellow once more broke into print. Marching down to the foot of Chicago avenue and discovering a gang of workmen engaged in civic improvements, he doffed his aged plug hat and said:

I warn that you are trespassing upon my property and that I will have you all arrested and punished.

For his efforts, the Cap’n found himself once more briefly behind the bars.

Streeter saw a chance to make money selling beer on Sundays to thirsty pilgrims from across the border in Illinois. Business started off briskly, but it was not long before the authorities heard about it. So one Sunday, some time in 1915, the invaders descended in force, raided the Cap’n’s place, his castle near the foot of Chestnut Street, seized hundreds bottles of beer, and carried Streeter and “Ma” off in a police ambulance.

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Cap’n and Ma Streeter in a 1915 court appearance.

This marked the beginning of the the end of the old man, although he still was full of fight. In 1918 he and “Ma” returned one day to their home to find it in ruins. He took to life afloat again. His houseboat went up the north branch of the Chicago River, then out and down the lake near East Chicago, so that he might establish an Indiana residence and get proper jurisdiction for renewed legal action. While living on the north branch of the river, he stepped from his houseboat one evening to address the Dill Pickle Club. He said:

The courts tried to get me on everything but adultery, and I beat them every time.

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Facsimile of document which, with other claims, was the basis of Cap’n Streeter’s contention that he was the owner of the property comprising Streeterville. The document was declared a forgery on August 9, 1895, due to the fact that the signature below Grover Cleveland’s is spelled “Oak Smith,” referring to Hoke Smith, Secretary.

This statement, of course, was a gross exaggeration. Although he had appeared innumerable times in state and federal courts, he never had been able to obtain a title to the land lying within the District. His claim was based upon squatter’s rights, upon old old documents bearing the signature of President Cleveland. These last, in the form of grants from the government, were discussed as follows in a master of chancery’s report as far back as 1918:

Streeter claims title since 1886 by virtue of two alleged land warrants, recorded and purported to be signed by President Grover Cleveland, by Hoke Smith, secretary, and S. W. Lamereaux, recorder in the land office. Hoke Smith never was secretary to the President, but at the time was secretary of the interior, and Lamereaux never was recorder.

The name of Hoke Smith was written as “Oak Smith.”

Most of Streeter’s battling was done with him in the role of a defendant, but on Sept. 5, 1920, he took the offensive, when he filed his famous suit against the Chicago Title and Trust company and a number of other defendants. The case had scarcely gotten under way, however, when the old fellow gave up the ghost on Jan. 24, 1921, at the ripe age 84. Death came to him on his houseboat as is it lays moored off East Chicago.

Upon the passing of the aged battler an effort was made to substitute “Ma” Streeter as the plaintiff in the case, but it was shown that she had not been legally married to the Cap’n and therefore could not be considered as his widow. When the heirs of Streeter discovered that there was a judgement standing against him for which they would be liable if they entered the case as plaintiffs, they elected to keep clear of that particular bit of litigation, preferring to file their own suit later.

The battle, as far as the old man was concerned, therefore, came to an end shortly after his death, leaving the property owners of Streeterville still in possession of their various parcel of land. Their titles were based upon old deeds, accretion (land formed in the laje at the water’s edge of their properties) and old contracts with the Lincoln Park commission.

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A scene at the Cap’n’s funeral. Note the flag and the plug hat atop the casket.

“Ma” Streeter lived on until the autumn of 1936, when at the age of 65 she breathed her last in the County hospital. After the Cap’n’s death she had made good her promise to carry on his fight for ownership of the land in Streeterville. Despite court efforts to remove her, she continues to live aboard the houseboat, the Vamoose, until it finally rotted to the water line. It was burned by the city in 1928. In 1924 “Ma” filed suit for a billion dollars against the Chicago Title and Trust company and some 1,500 lake shore property owners. She ceased to be active as a court principal, however, when Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson, ruled that her marriage to Cap’n Streeter was illegal. It was proved that the Cap’n had married one Mary Collins by South Bend, In., in 1905 and had never taken the trouble to obtain a divorce.

In 1923 twenty-three heirs of Streeter filed a declaration by federal court asking $5,000,000 damages of 3,500 individuals and corporations, The tract involved in the suit was the famous Streeterville district. Among the defendants were Stanley Field, Potter Palmer Jr., Kellogg Fairbank, the Drake hotel owners, the Furniture Mart, the Palmolive building, the Ogden T. McClurg estate, Northwestern university, the University of Chicago, the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, George W, Dixon, Grank J. Loesch, Honore Palmer, the Chicago Title and Trust company, the Illinois Merchants Trust company, the Northern Trust company, Charles H. Swift, Joseph Leiter, Silas H. Strawn, George A. McKinlock, and Augustus S. Peabody.

This is the suit that was remanded to the federal District court after an appeal by the Streeter heirs in 1932 to the federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It still is pending in the District court.

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Streeterville View from Erie St., 1909

The Water Tower and the Pumping Station’s smoke stacks are visible at the hazy horizon line to the left.

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Streeterville View from Erie St., 1909

Dirt paths formed along fence lines leading towards the lake.
The Water Tower and a smoke stack from the Pumping Stationis visible along the right edg

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In 1909, the District of Lake Michigan, was a very desolate place (above).
Same view, looking north, only fourteen years later (bottom).

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View of Lake Shore Drive from the Water Tower in 1889 and 1934.

Left:

Right:

The Chicago Examiner, April 16, 1915

Only a few years have passed since the founder of “Streeterville,” who gave his name to the strip of bleak lake shore, contended for possession, yet in that time we have acquired an “East Side.” Previously we might walk north or south or west, but to go east we must sail or swim.

Now that little patch of ”made” land that lies in the sweep of the outer drive, with East Pearson street defining its southern edge, has become the very center of fashion. Not a vacant apartment is ever to be had of either the most costly ones or the simpler quarters m the “Bridewell,” where live the newlyweds.

Some of the older tenants of the stately 999 Lake Shore drive have furnished with the choicest things brought from old homes. Mrs. Henry M. Bhepard’s apartment is filled with lovely colonial mahogany, every piece of which has a history. The walls of ihe McCormick apartment are hung with good pictures, among which are some rare old English prints of the hunt, and the furniture is very fine, French and Italian.

The Secor Cunninghams have a fortune in paintings, rugs and hangings, many from the old Paris home of Mrs. Cunningham’s mother, the late Mrs. H. P. Stone. Among the younger folk the Donald Forgrans have one of the loveliest homes, but there are scores of them.

Among the early settlers in this new quarter are Mrs. Winterbotham, the Louis Swifts, Dr. and Mrs. George V. Marquis, the Rosecranz Baldwins. the Ernest Walkers, Springer Brookses, Emil Wettens, E. G. Shumways, David Thompsons, Edward Clarks, Dr. and Mrs. Cary, S. M. Paines, Oren Tafts, L. O. Meechams, Elmer Fosters, Huntington Henrys and the Milton Kirks.

Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1919

No. 18 Tooker place, the home of the Dill Picklers, was dignified last night with the presence of Cap’n George Wellington Streeter. The cap’n was due to address the bohemians at 8:30, but it was not until an hour later that he arrived in the hovel of the intellectuals.

“I’m glad to see you all, ladies and gen’lemen. I haven’t made up my mind what I’m goin’ to talk about, but—”

The Thirty Years’ War.
Before he had finished amid the plaudits of the highbrows, the cap’n had discussed everything but girth control and the ethical code of the antediluvian dinosaurs. Riparian rights, likker, the constitution, Germany, class conflict, money hogs, George Washington, cops, judges, Ireland, lawyers, Joliet, free speech, etc., etc.—the cap’n mentioned ’em all.

He was especially eloquent, however, on the subject of his thirty years’ war with the state of Illinois. With great gusto he described his battles with the Chicago coppers especially his capture of Capt. Heidelmeyer.

The cap’n was dolled up in a plug hat and Prince Albert and a standup collar, wide enough not to interfere with the jurisdiction of his Adam’s ap-ple. The cap’n is very touchy on the subject of jurisdiction.

The Capn’s Observations.
A few of his bon mots follow:
“It’s hard for any poor man to get any redress in this here country because the judges is controlled by capitalists.”

“The courts tried to get me on ev. everything but adultery, an’ I beat ’em every time.”

“The constitution says that any president who participates in any foreign wars must be arrested, impeached an’ hung.”

“If pro’bition ain’t the dirtiest imposition ever happened upon this country, then I haven’t got nothing to say.”

“People oughtn’t to be dragged off to prison for arguin’. That’s what they done in Ireland, an’ what is the result? The Irish is just as bad as ever.”

Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1926

No attempt has been made to point out every project in Streeterville, and only a couple on the west side of Boul Mich have been given, because they are practically in Streeterville. Excavation has started or soon will start on several big projects in Streeterville; for instance, the Chatclaine Tower, a hotel for women, and several big apartment buildings.

Chicago Tribune, August 30, 1928

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The last chapter in the long story of the late Capt. George Wellington Streeter’s struggle to claim some of Chicago’s most valuable property was written yesterday by Corporation Counsel Samuel A. Ettelson. He ruled that the ancient Streeter houseboat was a menace to navigation at the mouth of the river and could be removed.

The old boat has been tenantless for some time. Its last occupant was Ma Streeter, the captain’s widow, but she disappeared some time ago and is believed to be dead.

Capt. Streeter claimed the district now known as Streeterville because after he first set foot on Chicago’s shore the waves did the rest, for years adding sand , but as long as thirty years ago other interests were filling in, “making land,” and Streeter had a losing fight in the courts.

Chicago Tribune, March 28, 1903

Nathaniel Kellogg Fairbank, for thirteen years president of the Chicago club and for nearly a half a century a leading figure in the charitable and business life of Chicago and the west, died at 4:30 o’clock yesterday morning in his home, 1801 Michigan avenue. His death was due to a paralytic stroke which he suffered a year ago.

Owing to his advanced age, 73 years, all hope for his recovery had been abandoned and his death was not unexpected by his family. He began to fail a week ago and it was soon apparent that the end was near. Arrangements for the funeral have not been completed, but it probably will be held on Monday. The Rev. Robert Collyer of New York will be asked to conduct the service, and the pallbearers will be selected from his friends among the membership of the Chicago club, of which he practically was the founder.

Mr. Fairbank, as the founder and active head of the N. K. Fairbank company and the Fairbank company, a benefactor of Newsboys’ home, St. Luke’s hospital, the Thomas orchestra, and other public institutions, had long since taken front rank among Chicago citizens. He leaves an estate estimated at $2,000,000.

Starts as Bricklayer’s Apprentice.
Born in Sodus, Wayne county, N.Y., in 1829, of parents who were able to give him a start in life, he was kept in school until he was 15 years of age. Then his parents met with financial reverses and he was forced to start out for himself. His first employment was an apprentice to a bricklayer in Rochester. He served out his time and then became a bookkeeper in a flour mill. He soon acquired an interest in the business.

Attracted by the opportunities in the west he came to Chicago in 1855, after a short time spent in Buffalo. In this city he became the western representative of David Dows & Co., a New York grain and commission house. He joined the board of trade in that year, when that institution was only seven years old, and remained one of its leading members for nearly fifty years.

Big Deals on Board of Trade.
The board of trade was housed at that time in what was called the “shanty,” a frame building abutting on the south branch of the Chicago river not far from Madison street. B. P. Hutchinson, Sidney Kent, Asa Dow, and Mr. Fairbank, were among the largest operators on the exchange. Mr. Fairbank’s first big deal was in September wheat in 1872. The price reached $1.60, the second highest price ever known on the board. The deal was a failure, but those concerned in it paid up in full. In the year following and in still other years Mr. Fairbank took part in successful deals.

Mr. Fairbank became interested in the making of lard and cottolene through buying into the firm of Smedley, Peck & Co. This firm became in time N. K. Fairbank & Co., Joseph Sears and W. H. Burnett being taken into the concern. The firm did an extensive business for years and until it was sold out to the first cotton seed oil trust. In order to keep his name, however, the company paid Mr. Fairbank $1,000 a month as nominal president of thr concern.

Aids Public Building Projects.
Just after the Chicago fire George B. Carpenter went to Mr. Fairbank with plans for a new music hall, which was badly needed. Mr. Fsirbank started the subscription with $25,000 for himself, and personally secured many of the contributions which finally built the Central music hall. A few years later, when another musical need of Chicago developed, he personally offered to subscribe $100,000 of $900,000 more should be raised. This offer stood for several years and was finally dropped before the project for the present Auditorium was started.

Mr. Fairbank was a director in the Commercial National bank and of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad company. He was also interested in the construction of a railroad in Arizona, now part of the Santa Fè system.

When the Chicago club was looking for a permanent home, in 1874 he practically built the structure opposite the Palmer house, in Monroe street, where this club and subsequently the Columbus club were housed. Of the total cost $85,000 was borne by the members and $50,000 by Mr. Fairbank himself. In recognition of his efforts the Chicago club elected him its president for thirteen successive years.

Mr. Fairbank was married in 1866 to Miss Helen L. Graham of New York, who died several years ago. He left four sons and three daughters. They are Mrs. Benjamin Carpenter, Misses Margaret and Nathalie Fairbank, and Kellogg, Dexter, Wallace and Livingston Fairbank. Mr. Fairbank was a member of Grace Episcopal church, and one of the supporters of St. Luke’s hospital. He was a member of the Calumet, Chicago, Union League, and Washington Park clubs.

1915—Eastland Disaster

Notorious Chicago

On Saturday, July 24, 1915, the S.S. Eastland, known as the “Speed Queen of the Great Lakes,” was part of a fleet of five excursion boats assigned to take Western Electric employees, families and friends across Lake Michigan to Michigan City, Indiana, for a day of fun and fellowship. But the festivities were short-lived and quickly turned tragic. The final count of deaths was 844.

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Chicago Tribune July 25, 1915

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“Somebody made a big mistake!”

Five words serve to epitomize the official summing up of the Eastland (US No. 200031) tragedy as a half dozen investigating agencies close in on the mistaken somebody.

“Somebody made a big mistake”—what will take rank as one of the big mistakes in history—and the placid, shallow, narrow, utilitarian Chicago river folded to its bosom perhaps as many human beings as ever were caught in any ocean tragedy of modern times.

At midnight there had been taken from the overturned excursion boat and from the river near the scene of the disaster—the familiar old Clark street bridge—919 dead bodies of children, women, and men who had boarded the vessel at 7:30 a.m. for a Western Electric gala excursion to Michigan City.

Of the 889 bodies recovered, approximately 200 have been identified. The others lie, unclaimed and tagged with numbers, in the Second Regiment armory, Curtis street and Washington boulevard (HARPO Studio). The armory was open through the night for the admission of people looking for their dead and missing friends.

Dead May Reach 1,800
Estimates of the total number of dead—based on the recovery of the 919 bodies—are still uncertain. Of the passengers and crew, reported to be a few less than 2,500, 700 have reported safe. This would mean that 900 bodies are still in the hull of the vessel or in the river, with a total of 1,200 dead.

However, the authorities do not believe that any such number are dead and not recovered. It is supposed that many of the passengers got off the ill fated boat without reporting the fact. If there are 300 bodies still to be recovered—and work is continuing through the night—the total death list would number approximately 1,200, Perhaps it is not so large—it may be larger.

strongAMAZING PHOTOGRAPH OF EASTLAND DISASTER
This Photo, Showing the Victims in the Water, Was Taken About Eight Minutes After the Catastrophe. The Photographer (Mike Psaris) Had His Camera Trained on the Boat Before It Overturned, But Was Too Stunned to Make the Exposure at the Instant.
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① Main deck forward, ② The bridge, ③ Removing body of woman from starboard quarter, ④ Foremast stays, ⑤ Boat deck, ⑥ Deck housing for life boats, ⑦ Lifeboat from Theodore Roosevelt, ⑧ Overturned lifeboat swinging from davits, ⑨ Lifeboat made fast, ⑩ Men and women on life raft, ⑪ Crew releading lifeboat from davits, ⑫ Frenzied passengers gained safety on ship’s deck

An Unparalleled Tragedy.
In the dire catastrophe of the Eastland there was no thrilling mid-ocean fight against raging winds and mountain seas, no hidden iceberg on a lonely course of midnight collision, no thunder of big guns in a clash of rival fleets.

But, literally in the heart of a great city, with elevated trains and street cars thundering past within a few hundred feet, on a mild summer morning, with a multitude to look on in mute helplessness, with metropolitan skyscrapers casting their shadow over it all, something like 1,200 persons went to their death in a prosaic excursion boat as it capsized at its berth. Small boats were all about; a city fire station within a few dozen steps. An the boat was lashed to its dock!

Such was the unparalleled, paradoxical tragedy of the Eastland. The victims perished within reaching distance of shore, within speaking distance of streets crowded with office bound loop workers.

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No Warning; No Escape.
The better part of them, with women and children outnumbering the men four to one, died without a chance for life. Packed mostly between decks aboard the cranky craft, they got no warning from officers and crew until the water was upon them, Then it was too late.

Last night, under the glaze of a row of great flaming lights, they were still taking the bodies from the death ship, while the police fought back the crowd which had lingered all day about the scene of disaster, striving for a glimpse of what was going on behind the bluecoat cordon.

View of the disaster area from the Clark Street dock.

Rescuers Work All Night.
the old Eastland, its livery work done, lay wearily on its port side less than fifty feet from where it started. More than half the boat was submerged. On the dry uppermost portion firemen, federal life savers, policemen, physicians, and other rescue workers hovered about yawning holes which had pierced through the steel shell by oxygen flames. Over all emergency lights flared and flickered, casting an unearthly glow on the faces of the dead as they were brought forth and placed on the stretchers.

Besides the arcs and the 125 electric tungsten lamps, which employees of the Commonwealth Edison company had strung along the upper side of the Eastland and through its interior, ten searchlights played on the hull from the roof and tower of the Reid-Murdoch company warehouse on the opposite side of the river, which, earlier in the day, had been requisitioned as a temporary hospital and morgue. There also was an improvised telephone service on the hull connecting with the main trunk lines ashore. In addition to which the telephone company had supplied a score of free phones for the use of survivors, their friends, and relatives.

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Divers Continue Work.
Three divers, stripped to the waist, kept “treading water” in the hull. When they kicked a body they called to men above, who retrieved it with pike poles and grappling irons. This morning the work will be renewed with three fresh divers from Milwaukee.

There were holes in the starboard side of the Eastland through which the rescuers worked. The holes had been pierced by oxygen flames over the protest of Hrry Pedersen, captain of the boat. Pedersen had got himself into trouble earlier in the day by ordering the men with oxygen torches to do nothing that would damage the hull. Subsequently the captain and his first mate, together with others of the crew, were arrested by order of Herman Schuettler, first deputy superintendent of police.

Above the whole tragedy one point stands out—a point on which the stories of the survivors, however incoherent, agree. That is, that, although the Eastland was known over the lakes for its lack of stability, neither officers nor crew apprised the passengers of their danger until it was too late for them to save themselves.

Two Big Questions.
According to the testimony now in hand, passengers were sliding down the sloping deck and the port rail was at the water’s edge before there was an official chorus of:

Get over on the other side, everybody!

There are two big questions which the various investigating bodies will seek to have answered:

Already there had been several answers to both questions.

R. H. McCreary, navigation inspector, says he turned away all perspective passengers after his automatic counter registered 2,500.

Contradicting McCreary’s assertion is the estimate of two officials in charge of the outing that 3,200 persons, of whom the women outnumbered the men four to one, had been crowded aboard the Eastland.

The Eastland’s gauge tender came forward late in the afternoon with the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship company’s version of the capsizing.

A sudden rush of passengers to the port side of the excursion boat to view a passing launch carried the Eastland over, he said.

But in their stories the survivors say there was no such rush—that the crowd, great though it was, seemed evenly distributed over the vessel.

Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1915

The diagram on the left shows a cross section of the hull of the Eastland, indicating the absence of a keel, which Naval Architect J. Devereux York asserts might have saved the vessel. If the ship had been constructed as shown on the right Mr. York believes the accident would not have happened. He says that every safety principal in boat construction was violated in the Eastland in the interest of cheapness and speed.

While the Mandolin Plays
It was at 7:40 o’clock that the Eastland went over, just as its stern line had been cast off from its berth west of the south end of the Clark street bridge. On the east side of the bridge the steamer Theodore Roosevelt, also chartered by the picnickers, was taking on a second load of passengers.

On the upper deck of the Eastland a little mandolin and fiddle orchestra was playing ragtime. There was no dancing, for the crowd overflowed the dance floors.

Some of those aboard the boat had noticed it was unsteady and swaying from side to side without apparent cause. At last, when it seemed the vessel could hold no more passengers, the gangway was drawn in.

A belated passenger was permitted to jump the gap, and then, the stern line cast off, the Eastland swung out into the river. But it was still held to the dock by its bow line, while deckhands made fast a hawser from the tug Kenosha, which was to tow it out of the harbor.

What stability the Eastland had before seemed to have been supplied by the close drawn stern line. Freed, it began to list to port, leaning toward the Reid, Murdock & Co. warehouse on the other side of the river.

View of Eastland taken from Fire Tug in river, showing the hull resting on it’s side on the river bottom.

First Listing Ignored.
At first the Eastland heeled slowly, almost imperceptibly. Harry Pedersen, the captain, stood stood on the bridge shouting orders. Neither he, hos officers, nor his crew paid attention to the list, and those of the passengers who had felt slight alarm forgot their fear.

The orchestra played on. The picnickers, a cargo of white shirts, duck trousers, and waving handkerchiefs, shouted farewell to their friends left behind on the dock—the friends who were to start across the lake later aboard the Theodore Roosevelt.

Farther over leaned the Eastland. Chairs began to slip from beneath their occupants. Still, the captain stuck to his bridge, his voice ringing reassuringly. The musicians continued their fiddling, digging their heels into the deck to keep from sliding downhill over the deck.

Everything was all right, it seemed. The river was narrow; the Eastland was big and therefore safe. There was the deck comfortingly near, the big warehouses throwing their shadows clear across the stream, cars and trucks rumbling over the bridges, the crowd on the Roosevelt waving farewell.

Then, with a final lurch of the top-heavy hull, tragedy took a hand in the picnic. The music stopped in the middle of a bar. Downhill against the port rail tumbled the musicians, scattered and mixed among the rolling, struggling passengers.

Women Slide Into Water.
It was a hill there was no climbing, a hill that grew steeper and more impossible with each instant. There was silence for a second as the deck was swept clean. The water rose to the port rail. It was the signal for a chorus of screams. The water drowned them.

Some of those on the open upper deck, confident of their ability to swim—boys and men for the most part—jumped overboard. The rest, the women, were slid into the river.

Below, on the boxed-in ‘tween decks, it was different—worse. At the last moment, with the Eastland leaning at an angle of 45 degrees, there had been a rush for the companionways. A few reached the upper deck and comparative safety, and then, with hundreds of men, women, and children jammed in a death tangle, the “grand staircase” gave way. Thus the main escape from the entrapping lower decks was blocked.

Close to the Eastland’s berth the river is only a little more than twenty feet in depth. The big excursion boat, with a beam more than twice twenty feet, went no further when its port side found the bottom. It lay like a toy boat of tin wrecked in a gutter. Its starboard half rising clear of the water.

Sea of Bobbing Heads.
On to the starboard side climbed the handful—perhaps 200—who had been fortunate enough to be close to the upper rail and who had presence of mind to cling to it.

Scarcely had the Eastland capsized when on the surface of the river, which a moment before showed only the scum of commerce, appeared a hundred bobbing heads, a crew-less and passenger-less lifeboat that had floated free of its davit, and a couple of automatically released life rafts. Before boats lowered by the Roosevelt and the steamer Petoskey, lying near, could reach them many of the heads disappeared.

The Eastland with the Favorite (US No. 203983) excursion boat nearby.

Saved—Red Haired Boy.
The life rafts meant the saving of a score who managed to reach them. The one lifeboat that drifted away from the Eastland was picked up with a single passenger—a red haired boy of 6 plucked from the river and tossed onto it.

Employees of the commission houses which back on the river threw crates and barrels overboard, and more, clinging to these, were taken from the water as the rescue forces assembled. But the biggest factor in the business of life saving was the Kenosha. Apparently its captain realized what was coming before the Eastland’s own officers.

Pontoon Bridge Built.
There was a jungle of bells aboard the tug and it bucked until its stern rested against the horizontal bow of the excursion boat. Then the bow of the tug was swung in to the dock and a bridge to shore was formed for those who had gained the uppermost side of the Eastland. Over the “bridge” scores footed to safety.

Within a few minutes, the fireboats Graeme Stewart and D. J. Swenie, with otherv tugs and launches, raced up the river to the rescue. Those who had clung to the starboard rail and climbed over side were put ashore. Their places on the hull were taken by rescuers—Capt. Carlund and his crew of life savers from the government station at the mouth of the river, firemen, policemen, a hastily organized medical staff.

Police ambulances, hospital ambulances, and undertakers’ ambulances, called from all parts of the city, flocked to the Clark street bridge. Trucks and wagons brought lung motors and other respiratory apparatus.

Rescue workers pull a person out of the water and onto the boat Racine, while the SS Eastland, background, lies on its side in the Chicago River.

Panic on the Roosevelt.
After an incipient panic aboard the Roosevelt had been checked by the vessel’s officers, who kept the passengers below decks until their excitement had abated, the second excursion boat was turned into a temporary morgue.

Bodies taken from the Eastland by divers and firemen were stretched along the Roosevelt’s decks until there was room for no more. Then the Reid-Murdoch warehouse was thrown open for the reception of the dead.

Over the side of the Eastland, over the deck of the Kenosha, along the narrow dock, and up the stairs to the street level crawled a continuous double line of stretcher bearers, policemen for the most part. Once the work was systemized bodies were brought out of the hull at the rate often of two a minute.

Physicians Aid Rescue.
Through the early hours—while there were any more chances left—not a chance was taken. Dr. Thomas A. Carter, Dr. M. K. Little of the local Red Cross, and other assisting physicians injected strychnine into each body as it came forth. But that was not all. Up on the bridge and on the sidewalk to the south, supervised by Dr. W. A. Evans, health editor of the Tribune, a staff of physicians and nurses waited with the lung machines.

A score of the machines clanked at the same time. In a few cases men and women apparently dead were restored to life and carried to hospitals. Before an hour had passed the Iroquois Memorial hospital. the Practitioners’, and other downtown institutions were overcrowded with these and other survivors, and ambulances were racing between the bridge and outlying hospitals.

Occasionally, at a nod from one of the long motor operators, waiting stretcher bearers would bring on another body and carry away the one into which science had been unable to put breath. The bodies they took away from the lung motor area went across the bridge to the warehouse.

On July 24, 1915, Cleveland News cartoonist Bob Satterfield was crossing the Clark Street Bridge when he witnessed the capsizing of the SS Eastland. He watched the rescue attempts, and drew this sketch that morning, while it was still fresh in his mind. It was published on July 27, 1915

Most Victims Suffocated.
Coroner’s Physician Joseph Springer examined most of the bodies as they were brought ashore. By pinching the throat of each victim with his fingers the physician determined how they had met death—whether from drowning or suffocation. Dr. Springer said the majority had been suffocated.

Under the steel shell of the Eastland the rescuers could hear tappings and faint cries. After divers had failed to locate the imprisoned passengers a call was sent out for acetylene torches. It was planned to cut eight holes in the steamer’s side.

Eastland Captain Harry Pedersen stands on the hull disapproving of welders cutting into his ship. Police later arrested him and removed him from the scene.

Try To Stop Rescuers.
Capt. Pedersen, Dell Fisher, his first mate, and a dozen of the crew were still lingering among the rescuers on the hull. As the torch operators set to work Pedersen rushed to halt them.

“Here, stop that!” he cried,

“My orders are to save lives, not be careful of the boat,” retorted one of the operators.

Later fifteen of Petersen’s crew were arrested for interfering with the work of the electricians and torch men. The captain’s actions led N. W. LeVally, manager of the Oxwald Acetylene company in charge of the work of piercing the hull, to lodge a complaint against him.

Torch operator working on the hull.

40 Brought Through Hole.
J. H. Rista, chairman of the Odd Fellows’ league and relief board, was another who told of interference by Capt. Pedersen.

“I was using a torch on the hull when Pedersen rushed up and ordered me to stop,” he said. “I told him to go to a place where it is hotter than any torch flame. After I got rid of Pedersen we dragged forty people through the hole he tried to stop from making.”

Louis Schleiert, employed by the city fire prevention bureau, was a rescuer who went to work with a definite end in view. Schleiert’s own wife and two children were imprisoned in the hull. With an ax and an oxygen flame he pierced the shell—apparently unobserved by the vigilant Pedersen—and crawled below.

Crawling and swimming he made his way through the topsy-turvy rest rooms until at last he came upon three bodies he recognized. Had not the firemen found him Schleiert might have joined his family in death. He was carried from the hull unconscious and rushed to a hospital.

Women Driven Mad.
With the bodies a few survivors were brought out by the firemen. Among them were two women who had been trapped together in a stateroom. Both had been driven insame by the experience. Their names were not ascertained.

Pedersen and Fisher, the mate, were arrested by Schuettler’s orders following the former’s interference with the rescue work. They were kept for a time aboard the Graeme Stewart and then were started toward the first deputy’s office, where Coroner Hoffman and Charles Center Case, an assistant state’s attorney, were waiting to question them.

On the way to the city hall Petersen’s escort of twenty policemen was attacked by a mob anxious to get at the man held responsible for the disaster. The police succeeded in dispersing the crowd with their clubs, but one man broke through the cordon and struck Petersen in the face before he in turn was felled by a baton.

The Second Regiment Armory, on Washington Boulevard, served as a temporary morgue for victims.

Crowds Fought Back.
Policemen drafted from practically every station in the city had a hard fight all day to hold back the hundreds of thousands of persons who swarmed toward the Clark street bridge, intent on viewing the overturned Eastland and the work of recovering the bodies of its victims. The bridge approaches from Lake street on the south were held by a dozen police lines. So strict were Schuettler’s orders that even officials and newspaper men ha difficulty in getting through the cordons.

The Chicago Police maintained control of the increasing mass of onlookers.

The Setting and the Scene.
Observers at the scene were moved to remark that it is passing strange how quickly the human mind accustoms itself to gruesome sights.

After the first shock of the charnel ship had passed a flotilla of small boats dotted the surface of the river between Clark and La Salle streets—the smallest, smoothest, safest place of water in the world that formed the setting for the most colossal blunder and greatest ship tragedy in the world’s history.

Across from the upturned death ship a sort of pontoon bridge had been constructed so the steady stream of stretchers with their dead could be quickly unburdened in the big building on the north side of the stream.

A Routine Matter.
Four, five, and six hundred twisted, stiffened forms of babies, young girls, women, and men had been carried across the improvised bridge. Then it became a routine matter with the rescuers.

Policemen’s hands began to swell as they handled scores and hundreds of the victims of some awful criminal negligence. They worked like automations, however mindful the day long that some one’s precious lifeless clay was being removed from the maw of this death orgy.

But that one block of water between Clark and La Salle streets presented other scenes that made people wonder whether they were dulled to such wholesale slaughter of innocents,

Same Thing All Over Again.
The flotilla of small boats, steam, motor, and row, skipped around over that one block of watery grave. The fishers for the dead had become accustomed to it long before noon. And throughout the afternoon, with rooftops, bridges, docks, and windows jammed with curious onlookers, they continued their searching.

Bodies would be picked up with grappling hooks. The man at the rope would announce the fact sort of perfunctorily. Then they would draw alongside and after a few pulls would lift another lifeless form, crumpled and stiff, over the boat side and start for Reid, Murdock & Co.’s building which had been turned into a temporary morgue.

Panorama of the Eastland disaster.

As Girl Is Lifted Out.
They kept on fishing all afternoon. The descending sun shot long rays of gold down over the flotilla, and every now and then yellowed a tangled bit of hair that floated on the water for a moment as they lifted some young girl’s body over the side and laid it on a stretcher.

Over on the main ship the steady stream of stretchers continued as the bodies were hoisted out of the submerged decks.

A great wire net had been thrown across the river at La Salle street. The boats nearest that barrier glided along in circles, stopping every little while to shake a form loose from the screen and lift it over the side.

Great Crowds Silent.
The crowds looked on in silence. They, too, had become accustomed to it. It was too big to grasp. A single drowning might have created more or excitement during the long afternoon—the afternoon of a day that wrote the most colossal tragedy of Chicago’s history.

They didn’t seem to want to go away. They just stared hour after hour, looking half blankly—accustomed to the monotony produced by the twelve hours of rescue work.

The ropes in the pulleys creaked incessantly. The police shouted:

Clear the gangway!

They made room for another stretcher to use. Perhaps it was a young man. It may have been a child or maiden, with her fluffy white gown wet down to her lifeless form—a band of black velvet around her waist—and the long, wet hair falling into the shafts of golden sunshine.

“The crowds looked on in silence. It was too big to grasp. They didn’t seem to want to go away. They just stared hour after hour.”

City’s Noises Never Stop.
The elevated trains maintained their regular schedule over the Wells street bridge, one block away. Huge ice wagons lumbered down Water street to the fruit houses.The accustomed noises of the great city sounded down on the glassy tomb of the innocents. Tugboats and scows glided past.

“It was passing strange,” said a bystander, “and one cannot grasp the enormity of the blunder—criminal, murderous blunder!”

“But it will all come back to that curious, silent, gaping growd when they get home tonight. It will come back more vividly tomorrow. And when the corteges move from desolate and anguish burdened Lomes this wee—then, in the very hush of the great city, they will feel it all—and understand.”

Chicago Examiner, July 25, 1915

Night brings no cessation to the rescuers’ hunt for bodies atop the Eastland; brilliant arcs light up the scene of the disaster.

Chicago Tribune July 25, 1915

“Now, whoop ‘er up and get busy. We will make this the biggest, finest picnic and the most successful affair that the Hawthorne club ever pulled off.”

That was the final instruction to the committee chiefs handed out by F. B. Holmes, president of the Hawthorne Club at the last meeting before the club’s fifth annual excursion and picnic at Michigan City.

Two committeemen went to it with a vim, and when their reports were in 7,000 employees of the Western Electric company’s works at Hawthorne had been booked for the trip.

Formed Seven Years Ago.
Seven years ago the Hawthorne club was formed as a social and educational organization of the Western Electric company’s employees. It became an immediate success and starting a men’s club, soon spread to the women employees. The club gave dinners, amateur theatricals, organized a band, and held night classes to help along members.

The one biggest affair of the club for the last four years had been the outing at Michigan City. Each year’s program brought more enthusiasm into the club.

But the greatest of all was to be the picnic of 1915.

July and August 1915 covers of Western Electric News organ.

Company Officials Boost.
This picnic was to be the absolute and final word in the expression of the carnival spirit. The officers of the company and the officials of the Hawthorne plant were among the merry boosters. While the organization was not a part of the company it had always been befriended by the management attending to loyalty and good work.

The committee was so full of inspiration that a newspaper for the promulgation of picnic plans was born.

The July Jubilator came roaring off the press in four happy shouting pages telling the Hawthorne club folks about the great things to be done and to be seen at Michigan City.

“No Jonah About This.”
Volume 1, No. 1 of the Jubilator was hot, but No. 2 was considerably hotter as follows:

The Jubilator and the gossip of the shops at noon hours bubbled with the news of the picnic plans.

Movie Men to Be There.
Arrangements were made to take thousands of feet of moving pictures at the big picnic and the Jubilator set them astir with “Be a movie actress, girls. You will be in it—the beauty parade.”

A thrilling program of athletic men and water sports were announced. “The Beauty Parade, the Swimming Boys,” were headliners. There were to be canoe races, fishing, boating, and basking in the sunshine and close to mother earth.”

The 1914 Beauty Parade.

Hundreds of Entrants.
There were hundreds of clamoring entrants for the events. Everybody wanted to play ball; most everybody wanted to enter the tug of war. They planned a sack race, a “single ladies’ race,” a “mixed couple”—all the kinds of races that an inventive committee could give names for.

The picnic committee and half a dozen subcommittees went ahead to Michigan City to make plans for the invasion of the picnic ten thousand.

Each year the Western Electric visitor had been made welcome at Michigan City, and because of the success of previous performances the city officials decided that the parade was to extend beyond the confines of the outing park and progress through Franklin street.

All Seek Prizes.
Every department at the big Hawthorne works got busy framing to win a prize in the parade competition.

The achievements of the company were to be symbolized among its floats, and biggest of all there was planned a special pageant which should commemorate the great telephone achievement of the decade—the linking of New York and San Francisco by the long distance wires. This was a matter of special pride at the plant—for be it known, the Western Electric company’s workers are the makers of the apparatus with which the American Telegraph and Telephone company (the Bell companies) spans the continent.

Are You Ready?
The Jubilator thundered off the press in a pink “sporting extra.” It demanded to know:

Boosters Are Justified
The boosters were justified when President Holmes, Vice President F. J. Sheridan, and Secretary J. F. Krivanek of the Hawthorne club got their final report the night before.

“Wonder if we’ve got enough boats?” they speculated as they scanned the list:
The Eastland, Theodore Roosevelt, Petoskey, Rochester, and the Kansas.

Negotiations were made for another vessel should the crowd require it.

Out in Gala Attire.
Yesterday morning the Western Electric folks at Hawthorne and about the west side generally turned out in gala attire. The street there were laden laughing parties of men and girls, everybody with picnic lunch in hand, dozens in the costumes in which they were to make merry in the big parade at Michigan City.

Volume 1, No. 6 of the Jubilator was out in its brightest pink, urging
“Do not wait for the last boat.”

The order of sailings was announced:

Eastland

Roosevelt

Petoskey

Racine

Rochester

Thousands on Docks.
Thousands, probably 5,000 picnickers in all, were at or about the docks when the loading of the Eastland began.

Two federal inspectors stood at the gangplank clicking their counting machines. Presently the boat was loaded.

Inspectors gave a command. The gangplank was lifted. Lines were cast off. The crowd pushed over the rail and cheers arose as a sea of waving hands reached out with banners, handkerchiefs, and sticks fluttering in the breeze. The first of the joy ships was about to be under way.

Then Something Happened.
Up at the bow a ateam tug gave merry “toot’ and the engines hummed and ground as the propellors began to churn water, starting to warp the boat out into the channel.

Then something happened.

Pretty soon the ambulances came and the arriving throngs of picnickers heard a man with a megaphone standing at the head of the dock stairs cry out:

Then an ambulance filled with dripping bodies went clanging up the street and the picnic crowd began to understand.

The non-Hawthorne excursion boats, the Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama left on schedule.

Chicago Tribune, August 13, 1915

Providence permitting the Eastland will be raised today.

Preparations to right the overturned boat were completed at 9 o’clock last night. Most of the water in the bull has been pumped out and the work of adjusting the hooks of the huge cranes to the sides of the vessel will start about day-break.

A large net has been stretched across the river at Wells street for the purpose of catching any bodies which may be carried downstream by the current when the ship is raised.

Traffic over the Weils street bridge wi!i be halted until after the divers have ascertained that no more bodies are buried in the mud.

How It Is to Be Raised.
The Eastland will be raised by four large cranes. Two of the cranes are to bo operated from the tug Favorite and the other two are on large scows. The hooks will be fastened to the port side of the boat, which is now under water, by divers.

One of the difficulties that is causing the officials in charge much concern is the nearness of the boat to the south dock of the river. They fear that when the boat Is righted by means of the cranes it will not have room enough to turn without striking the dock.

When the boat is righted its side will be within a rew inches of the dock. There is an even chance the boat will “slide ” a tew feet when the cranes start to hoist it. and in such an event it is likely tugs will have to be used to drag it toward the mid-die of the river before it can be raised.

Delays May Be Met.
F. H. Avers, superintendent of bridge construction of the department of publia works, voiced an opinion that the boat could not be raised for a week. He declared unforeseen difficulties would be encountered when the actual raising is begun.

One difficulty met with yesterday while the water was being pumped out was the outside pressure on the hull. When more then half of the water had been pumped out the pressure on the inside was reduced and there was danger of the outside pressure causing new leaks. The pumpe were stopped until divers could brace the inside of the hull with pleces of timber.

One Body Recovered.
The body of Martin Pawlowski, 3138 West Thirteenth street, was recovered during the afternoon. Evidently the body had been embedded in the mud near the stern of the boat and when a cable from one of the tugs was passed under it the body was released. The body was taken to the floating morgue and was identified immediately.

According to the records of the Western Electrie company, Pawlowski is the last of its missing employés. With the finding of Pawlowskl’s body Coroner Hoftman declared he believed no more bodies would be found under the boat. Others disagreed with him and forecast a number of other victims would be found buried in the mud Divers will explore every foot of the river bed near the spot where the East-land’s hull now rests.

Mayor on the Scene.
Mayor Thompson and James Pugh visited the scene of the disaster shortly after 5 o’clock yesterday and conferred with Coroner Hoffman. Capt. Morgan Colline of the central detail made arrangements to have an extra force of policemen on hand this morning.

The men have been told to report at 5 o’clock.

Actual work on the raising of the boat will not begin before 7:30 o’elock. Only those whose duties necessitates their presence will be allowed near the scene.

Eastland Fund Still Grows.
The Fastland relief fund of the mayor’s committee reached a total of $367.922.76 yesterday. Besides an additional $3,688.65 turned over to the committee by The Tribune, contributions were received during the day as follows:

“Tribune” Fund Grows.
Additional contributions to THE TRIBUNE Eastland Fund weretecelved yesterday as follows:

Phillips County Herald, August 27, 1915

Eastland Death Record Is 844.
Chicago,-The Eastland with death record of 844, finally got away from her pier in the Chicago river. With her superstructure gone and still covered with slime and mud from the river bottom, the boat was towed to Goose Island. The vessel is again in possession of the owners, the Chicago. St. Joseph Steamship Company, Officials of the line refused to say whether the boat would be put back into the passenger-carrying business.

Moving Pictures World, August 7, 1915

In less than fifteen minutes after the steamship Eastland with its thousanads of passengers aboard had tipped over on its side one of the Industrial Moving Picture Co.’s camera men was on the scene taking motion pictures of the event. Harry Birch of the Industrial camera force followed the fire engine expecting to cover a fire. When he reached the scene it proved to be one of the most horrible catastrophes this country has ever known.

While a heavy rain fell throughout the entire day the picture shows exceptional photography. Every scene is very clear. In portions of it the heavy downpour of the rain can be distinctly seen. The detail of the picture is very sharp considering the conditions which the pictures were taken under.

The Chicago Tribune will release this picture and has offered to donate the proceeds to the relatives of the victims of the disaster.

east

From Moving Pictures World, 14 August 1915

The Injunction on Eastland Moving Pictures in Chicago.

In my last letter, in the opening article, I stated that moving pictures of the Eastland Disaster had been prohibited in Chicago theaters until grief had become somewhat abated. At the time of writing it had supposed that Acting Mayor Moorehouse, who issued the order in the absence of Mayor Thompson, had acted from a sense of respect for the feelings of the relatives of the victims of the disaster, in the first hours of their agony over the loss of their dead. It was only fitting that this should have been done.

Later it developed that the order was mandatory in its nature, and that the exhibition of the pictures was to be altogether prohibited. On the return of Mayor Thompson, who had canceled all engagements at the San Francisco Exposition, whither he had gone with Governor Dunne and the First Regiment of the Illinois National Guard to celebrate Illinois Day, he appointed a committee of three, composed of civilians, to decide on the issuing of a permit for the exhibition of the pictures. The Chicago Tribune had taken 1,000 feet of these news pictures and offered to donate the entire proceeds, to which it was entitled, to the Eastland relief fund. The committee recommended the refusal of the permit, “out of regard and respect for the wishes and feelings of those who have suffered deep bereavement and are mourning for their tragic loss.” The Mayor thus shifted responsibility to the shoulders of the committee.
east
The three upright citizens on that committee doubtless acted from a deep sympathy for the bereaved, and without bestowing any thought on ‘the inequity of their decision against moving pictures; for that decision clearly discriminates against news in moving pictures in favor of news as expressed by the written word, supported by illustrations from still photographs of various scenes connected with the disaster.

The whole crux of the matter lies in this: the moving picture is comparatively new and the plaything of censorship; the press, having long since broken the shackles of a worse censorship, devotes its liberty to the securing of full rights and liberty for all. The morning of the day has already dawned when moving pictures will play their important part for good in the formation of public opinion and in the uplift of the race; and, at no distant period, those who come after us will be less amazed at the defeat of the opposition which the moving picture has met than at the glorious things it has wrought and accomplished in the lives and destinies of men.

But Acting Mayor Moorhouse. and the three gentlemen on the committee who declared against the exhibition of the Eastland pictures in Chicago, can console themselves with knowledge of the fact that they are not alone. The New York World stands with them editorially, thusly:

Why was it necessary for the acting mayor of Chicago to forbid the use of moving pictures of the Eastland wreck and the drowning of her passengers? Would any sane manager have attempted such an outrage?

Anent which the Milwaukee Sentinel, in. the issue of July 28, answers editorially:

To be frank, is a ‘moving picture’ of that grewsome business any worse than the stationary photographic reproduction of the same horrors—such as, for instance, furnishes the ghastly, but appealing, front page ‘window dressing’ of the same issue of Mr. Pulitzer’s lively newspaper?

No, neighbor. We are all in it. The public likes to ‘sup full of horrors’ on such occasions, and will be served. When newspapers upbraid the ‘movie’ men for turning these tragedies to profitable pictorial account, it seems a bit like Satan rebuking sin.’

From Moving Pictures World, 28 August 1915

ILLINOIS JOTTINGS.
Acceding to requests from patrons, the Princess theater, at Canton, cancelled its booking of the Eastland disaster films.

east

August 28, 1915 Advertisement by a Nashville film exchange

From Moving Pictures World, 4 September 1915

Facts and Comments
The opposition of certain constituted authorities against kinematographic records of the Eastland disaster has awakened some of our esteemed contemporaries to the parallel danger in censorship of the press. A newspaper in Western Pennsylvania in criticising the attempted censoring of the pictures of the Eastland catastrophe declares that “the censors do not yet seem to have arrived at the truth that the motion picture when it portrays incidents of every day life is news just as surely as anything that is printed in a newspaper.

The film is an engine of publicity of propaganda and truth with immense possibilities. It may be as dangerous to curb it as to curb the press, the platform or the pulpit. Comments like these are getting common in the daily press. The light is breaking.

Iroquois Theatre Fire

Notorious Chicago | Iroquois Theater | Eddie Foy

The day was Monday, November 27, 1903, when the brand new Iroquois Theater, an “absolutely fireproof” theatre, opened in Chicago at 24-28 Randolph (between State and Dearborn streets). On Wednesday, December 30th, the hit musical, “Mr. Bluebeard” starring Eddie Foy was enjoying its sixth week of a successful run as the Iroquois Theatre’s first production. Pictured on the bottom is the cover of the Programme.

Chicago Tribune, December 31, 1903

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Five hundred and seventy-one lives were destroyed by fire in the Iroquois Theater in the fifteen minutes between 3:15 and 3:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon. Of the dead, less than 100 were identified last night.

Of the unidentified nearly all were so badly burned that recognition was impossible. Only by trinkets and burned scraps of wearing apparel will the bodies of hundreds be made known to their families.

March from Deadhouse to Deadhouse.
All night long a horror chained but resolutely persistent throng of those whose friends and relatives were numbered among the missing lifted blanket after blanket in the search of fear through the morgues of the city.

Not since the Fire of 1871, when 250 were killed, has Chicago been mantled by such a universal tragedy; never has it received a blow so instantaneously shocking.

This frightful thing was over before the city knew it happened; the news in its wild spread left paralysis behind.

“Mr. Bluebeard” was being performed in the theater. An audience not only of unusual size but of unusual composition was listening to it. It was the matinée audience of the mid-holiday season.

Children and Women the Victims.
Only once in a year could such an audience have gathered; only once in all the twelve-month could so many children have been collected within the walls of the theater.

And on this one occasion the sacrifice to flames was demanded. There were men in the audience; there were men in the galleries, from which the greatest tribute of death was demanded, but they were few in proportion to the children. There were women, too. Some of them died with their arms around their children. Probably the proportion of men in the theater might have been one to ten women and children; of women one to four children or young people.

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After fifty-five hours had passed since the Iroquois fire, only twenty-one bodies remained unidentified out of the total number of 582 victims. The showing at midnight:

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Death’s Harvest in the Galleries.
There were 2,000 persons or thereabouts in the theater. Of that number 1,740 had seats. The rest were massed in the rear of the seats on the main floor and the first balcony.

In the galleries, even the rear seats of the second gallery, were seated persons who ordinarily would have not been content with anything less than parquet seats. They were mothers, aunts, and older sisters, taking the children for an outing which fitted only to this one afternoon; young fellows from college treating their visiting chums to the theater; school girls out with their young friends for the same kind of a lark. A number of parties consisted of trios of girls under 15 years of age.

Such was the human material provided on one side of the curtain.

On the other were 300 members of the extravaganza company. They were dressed in flimsy garments, trailing with gauze, veils of death once the breath of fire swept over them.

Fire Curtain a Delusion.
Between audience and performers was the curtain line, down with an asbestos fire curtain could have fallen a second after the alarm was given, confining the fire to the stage.

The curtain never fell.

The fire leaped from the stage as if from a furnace door. The draft from the opened stage exits behind drove it across the auditorium and upward to the galleries. Over a carpet of the dead it forced its own way through the chimney of the alley doors on the galleries.

The newest theater in Chicago, the playhouse declared to be fireproof from dressing rooms to capstone, burned till the stage was a steel skeleton and its wrecked interior a charnel house.

The coroner today will begin laboriously to try and learn who, if any one, was to blame; the building commissioner will endeavor to learn if the building was overcrowded, and if all the ordinances were obeyed.

And the people for their part will have funerals to attend. And there will be hearses at these funerals. The liverymen strikers will not molest them.

Why Curtain Failed to Work.
The only thing plain last night was that the asbestos curtain did not fall. The flyman of the theater, Charles Johnson, said that for some time past it had been the practice of the theater to have the curtain high at night so as to permit a good view for the aerial ballet.

“They attempted to drop the curtain,” he said, “but it would not drop below the height it had been fixed at,”

Manager Will J. Davis was not at the theater. The report made to him was that the curtain caught when a little way down and bulged out under the force of the terrific draft.

“Men tried to pul it down,” he said. “It would not come.”

Absent from All Important Post.
Another report in wide circulation was that the assistant stage manager, who had immediate charge of the curtain, was not on the stage, but in front. He, it was declared, could have touched an electric button which would have operated the sheet in a second. Without him, according to this story, the attempt was made clumsily to run the curtain down by hand, an attempt that failed.

The fire started while the double octet was staging “In the Pale Moonlight,” Eddie Foy, off the stage, was making up for his “elephant” specialty.

On the audience’s left—the stage right—a line flashed straight up. It was followed by a noise as of an explosion. According to nearly all accounts, however, there was no real explosion, the sound being that of the fuse of the “spot” light which is turned on a pivot to follow and illuminate the progress of the star across the stage.

“Spot” Electric Light the Cause.
This light caused the fire. On this all reports of the stage folk agree. As to manner, accounts differ widely. R. M. Cummings, the boy in charge of the light, said last night that it was short circuited.

Stage hands, as they fled from the scene, however, were heard to question one another. “Who kicked over the light?” The light belonged to the “Bluebeard” company.

Just a Little Flame at First.
The beginning of the disaster was leisurely. The stage hands had been fighting the line of wavering flame along the muslim fly border for some seconds before the audience knew anything was the matter.

The fly border, made of muslin and saturated with paint, was tinder to the flames.

Attack Blaze with Sticks.
The stage hands grasped the long sticks used in their work. They forgot the hand grenades that are supposed to be on every stage.

“Hit it with the sticks!” was the cry. “Beat it out!” “Beat it out!”

The men struck savagely. A few yards of the border fed upon the stage and was stamped to charred fragments.

That sight was the first warning the audience had. For a second there was a hush. The singers halted in their lines; the musicians ceased to play.

Then the murmur of fear ran through the audience. There were cries from a few, followed by the breaking, rumbling sound of the first step toward the flight of panic.

One Man Keeps His Head.
At that moment a strange, grotesque figure appeared upon the stage. It wore tights, a loose upper garment, and the face was one-half made up. The man was Eddie Foy, chief comedian of the company, the clown, but the only man who kept his head.

Before he reached the center of the stage he had called out to a stage hand; “Take my boy, Bryan, there! Get him out! There by the stage way!”

The stage hand grabbed the little chap. Foy saw him dart with him to safety as he turned his head.

Freed of parental anxiety, he faced the audience.

“Keep quiet!” he shouted. “Quiet.”

“Go out in order!” he shouted. “Don’t get excited!”

Between exclamations he bent over toward the orchestra leader.

Orchestra Plays in Face of Death.
“Start an overture!” he commanded. “Start anything. For God’s sake, play, play, play, and keep playing.”

The brave words were as bravely answered. Gillea raised his wand, and the musicians began to play. Netter than any one in the theater they knew their perm. They could look slantingly up and see that the 300 sets of the “Bluebeard” scenery all were ablaze. Their faces were white, their hands trembled, but they played, and played.

Foy still stood there, alternately urging the frightened people to avoid a panic and spurring the orchestra on. One by one the musicians dropped fiddle, horn, and other instruments and stole away.

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Iroquois Theater at the time of the fire

“Clown” Proves a Hero.
Finally the leader and Foy were left alone. Foy gave one glance upward and saw the scenery all aflame. dropping brands fell around him, and then he fled—just in time to save his own life. The “clown” had proved himself a hero.

The curtain started to come down. It stopped, it swayed as from a heavy wind, and then it “buckled” near the center.

All Hope Lost for Gallery.
From that moment no power short of omnipotent could have saved the occupants of the upper gallery.

The coolness of Foy, of the orchestra leaders and of other players, who begged the audience to hold itself in check, however, probably saved many lives on the parquet floor. Tumultuous panic prevailed, but the maddest of it—save in the doomed gallery—was at the outskirts of the ground floor crowd.

Those in greatest danger through proximity to the stage did not throw their weight against the mass ahead. Not ,amy died on the first floor, proof of the contention that some restraint existed in this section of the audience.

Women were trod under foot near the rear; some were injured. The most at this point, however, were rescued by the determined rush of the policemen at the entrance and of the doorkeeper and his assistants.

Some Exits Are Closed.
The theater had thirty exits. All were opened before the fire reached full headway, but some had to be forced open. Only one door at the Randolph street entrance was open, the others being locked, according, it appears, to custom.

From within and without these doors were shattered in the first two minutes after the fire broke out—by the theater employees, according to one report, by the van of fleeting multitude and the first of the rescuers from the street, according to another.

The doors to the exits on the alley side, between Randolph and Lake streets, in one or more instances, are declared by those who escaped to have been either frozen or rusted. They opened to assaults, but priceless seconds were lost.

Theatrical People All Escape.
Before this time Foy had run back across the stage and reached the alley. With him fled the members of the aerial ballet, the last of the performers to get out. The aerialists owed their lives to the boy in charge of the fly elevator. They were aloft, in readiness for their flight above the heads of the audience. The elevator boy ran his cage up even with the line of fire, took them in, and brought them safely down.

As Foy and the group reached the outer doorway the stage loft collapsed and tons of fire poured over the stage.

The lights went out in the theater with this destruction of the switchboard and all stage connections. One column of flame rose and swished along the ceiling of the theater. Then this awful illumination also was swallowed up. None may paint from personal understanding that which took place in that pit of flame lit darkness. None lives to tell it.

To those still caught in the structure the light of life went out when the electric globes grew dark.

In spite of the terrible form of their destruction, it came swiftly enough to shorten pains. This at least was true of those who died in the second balcony, striving to reach the alley exits abreast of them.

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Dead Piled Six Feet Deep.
Six and seven feet deep they were found, not packed in layers but jumbled and twisted in the struggle with one another.

Opposite the westernmost exit of the balcony—on the alley—was a room in the Northwestern University building (the old Tremont house), where painters were working, wiping out the traces of another fire.

They heard the sound of the detonation of the fuse; they heard the rush of feet toward the exit across the way. Out on the iron stairway came a man, pushed by a power behind, himself crazy with fear. He would have run down the iron fire escape, but flames burst out of the exit beneath and wrapped itself around the iron ladder.

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Bridge the Alley with Planks.
“A ladder!” shouted one of the painters, “Run it out.” It was run out. The man started to cross. The ladder slipped on the frosty window casing. Its burden was precipitated down on the icy ground.

The first of the arriving firemen picked up the broken form. The body was the first taken to a morgue.

Women prepared to jump from the platform.

“Wait!” cried the painters. “We have planks.” Three wide planks were thrust across the alley. The painters sank to their knees to anchor them. “Come on!” they shouted.

Little Girl First Across.
Hortense Lang, 10 years old, dragging her sister Irene, 11 years old, was the first to cross.

She was hysterical when she dropped inside the sheltering room.

“I was going to jump,” she sobbed, “but I thought of my mother. I just grabbed sister by hand and waited for the planks. I don’t know how we crossed.”

The mother, Mrs. L. Lang, 580 Forty-fifth street, also was in the theater, on the first floor. She got out safely, and an hour afterwards found her children in the Tremont house. The reunited three sat with arms around another for another hour.

Die with Safety in Sight.
Just twelve persons escaped across the plankway. The twelfth was pursued by a pillar of fire which dashed itself against the wall of the university building.

The steel platform was packed with women and children. They died right there. The bodies of some fell over into the alley. From within the bodies others fell part way out of the aperture.

The helpless watchers, peering through the smoke, could see the heaps of the dead between the seats and along the outside of the gallery.

Firemen crossed the gangway as soon as the tongue of flame drew back and climbed over the ghastly wall to direct the stream of water inward and downward.

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Floor Plan of The Iroquois

“Anybody Alive Here?” No Answer.
They entered too soon. The tongue again licked upwards. The fighters and rescuers retreated stubbornly, but they were driven back.

Marshall Campton was in command of the firemen. He saw that the gallery must be for a time abandoned. The forms of women and children were all about him and his men. No movement was perceptible, but he knew that the living might be buried under the dead.

“Is there any living person here?” the marshal shouted again and again.

The cry echoed through the silent place and no voice answered.

Once more he shouted, “If any one here is alive, groan or make some sound. We’ll take you out.”

Not a Moan Is Heard.
Not an arm waved in the mounds about him; no moan was heard.

“We will have to get back,” ordered the marshal, reluctantly. As they defiled over the planks the fire once more billowed to the windows. But this time no new victims. It needed not to make its work more thorough.

Fire Checked, Rescue Starts.
When the firemen reentered the theater from the alley side they were not again repulsed. They played upon the fire, now largely confined to the stage, long enough to permanently check it, and then all but the men needed to hold the lines of hose turned their attention to the labor of clearing the balcony of the bodies.

While they worked from the north scores of citizen rescuers were bearing corpses out through the Randolph street entrance. From this entrance also were borne the bulk of the injured.

There was no need for physicians to inspect the bodies taken out over the gangway.Scores of injured were cared for in the Northwestern University building, but they were persons brought in from the ground floor.

Bodies Not Recognizable.
The bodies dragged across the planks for the most part unrecognizable. Ropes were passed around the feet and one set of men pulled while one man steadied the head of the corpse. Once across, however, the bodies were cared for with tender pity. Blankets were thrown over them and they were laid in rows on the floor and on long tables. Not until 7 o’clock was the last body taken from the theater by this route. Toward the end the bodies were sent to the morgues as soon as they were received in the university building.

Meets Death in Many Ways.
The postures in which death was met showed how the end had come to many.

A husband and wife were locked so tightly in one another’s arms that the bodies had to be taken out together. A woman had thrown her around a child in a vain effort to save her. Both were burned beyond recognition.

The sight of the children’s bodies broke down the composure of the most restrained of the rescuers. As little form after form was brought out the tears ran down the faces of policemen, firemen, and bystanders. Small hands were clenched before childish faces—fruitless attempts at protection from the scorching blast.

Children Saved from Mutilation.
Most of the children will be recognized. Fate allowed that thin shadow of mercy. They fell beneath their taller companions. The flames reached them, but they were face downward, other forms were above them, and generally their features were spared.

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In Death They Save Others.
The persons crowded off the fire escape platform, and those who jumped voluntarily by their own death saved persons on the lower floor from injury. Scores jumped from the exits at the first balcony, the first to death and injury, the ones behind to comparative safety on the thick cushion of the bodies of those who preceded them and who fell from the balcony above. Other hundreds from the main floor jumped on to the same cushion—an easy distance of six feet—without any injury.

When the firemen came they spread nets, but the nets were black, and in the gloom they could not be seen. They saved few lives—argument for the use of white nets hereafter.

No Alarm Box at Theater.
The chain of mishaps surrounding the catastrophe extended to the fire alarm. There was no fire alarm box in front of the theater as at other theaters. A stage hand ran down the alley to South Water Street and by word of mouth turned in a “still” alarm to No. 13. The box alarm did not follow for some precious minutes. At least four minutes were lost in this way.

Few in Balcony Escaped.
Of the 900 persons seated in the first and second balconies, few if any escaped without serious injury.

So fiercely the fire burned during the short time in which hundreds of lives were sacrificed that the velvet cushions of the balcony seats were burned bare.

The crowds fought so in their efforts to escape that they tore away the iron railings of the balconies, leaping upon the people below.

Hours in Carrying Out Dead.
From 3 o’clock, when the alarm was sent in, to 7:30 o’clock, when the doors of the theater were closed. the charred, torn, and blistered bodies were carried from the building at a rate of four a minute. One hundred were taken out across the plank way.

Many blankets filled with fragments of human bodies taken from the building.

Hundreds Beyond Recognition.
Hundreds of bodies were taken from the building, their clothing gone, their faces charred beyond recognition. Under pretense of serving as rescuers ghouls gained entrance to the theater and robbed dead and dying in the midst of the fire.

Men fell on their knees and prayed. Men and women cursed. A rush was made for the Rndolph street exits. In their fear the crowds forgot the many side exits, and rushed for the doors at which they entered the theater. Little boys and girls were thrown to one side by their stronger companions.

Ten baskets of money and jewelry thrown in this manner were picked up from the main floor when the fire was extinguished.

Men and women tore their clothing from them. As the first rush was made for the foyer entrance to the balconies men, women, and children were thrown bodily down the steps.

A few score of those nearest the doorways escaped by falling or being thrown down the stairs of the main balcony entrance.

Scores were wedged in the doorways, pinned by the force of those behind them. There in the narrow aisles at the balcony entrances they were suffocated and fell—tons of human weight.

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A French tabloid’s version of the chaos inside the theater.

Rush Down Slanting Aisles.
All succeeded in leaving their seats in the first balcony. Climbing over the seats and rushing up the slanting aisles to the level aisles above, they fought their way. Those at the bottom of the mass were burned but a little. The top layer of bodies were burned till they never can be identified.

Firemen Work in Dark.
Darkness shrouded the theater with its hundreds of dead when the fire was under control that the building could be entered. The firemen were forced to work in smoky darkness when they started carrying the bodies from the balconies.

Falling over each other the rescuers groped in the dark for an arm or leg in the pile of victims trapped in the balcony. For an hour the rescue work was carried on without other light than that of candles.

Baby Stripped of Clothes.
All its clothing torn form it but a pair of baby shoes, the body of an infant was found in a far corner of the balcony.

In her haste to save herself the mother apparently had cast the child aside to be trampled upon and killed by the crowds.

So great was the confusion in the carrying out of the victims that the majority of those in the balconies whose bodies still contained life were the last to be taken from the building.

They were found underneath the dead, their lives saved by the stronger ones who had trampled them down. When itv was discovered that many were living the work of rescuing was begun. Charred and partly incinerated bodies were thrown or laid to one side. The forms of those apparently having life were carried out to be examined by the physicians.

Hatless, coatless, bruised, and bleeding from their fight for freedom, the crowds emerged. Men with presence of mind were carrying women and children. The strangest thing about their exit was the fact that it was silent. Few were screaming. The greatest nise was made by the gathering crowds.

Seeks Party of Twelve Children.
Managers Davis and Powers took up headquarters in the women;s dressing room south of the lobyb as soon as the fire was under control. Hardly had Mr. Davis entered the building when he was approached by George C. Sanburn, 834 Walnut street.

“I had twelve children in two boxes,” he said. “They’re missing. Are they in there?”

“My God, this is what cuts,” said Davis, and he turned away. Mr. Sanburn was assured that his son, Harold, 19 years old, had taken his sister, Eugene, 16 years old, and her ten guests from their boxes in safety.

“What do you want?” a policeman asked of C. E. Elliott, 1832 Michigan Avenue, when that man tried to force his way into the presence of the managers.

“My wife,” he sobbed, and turned away.

Plead for Word of Loved Ones.
Dozens went to the managers. Dozens pleaded with them for knowledge of their loved ones and were turned away by the heartsick men.

A woman, her hair flying, struck the policemen who would prevent her from seeing the managers, and slipped past them. Falling at the feet of a man in the room she threw her arms around his knees.

“O, my Harold,” she sobbed. “Please—please tell me, is he in there? God, man; that’s my only boy.”

The woman pulled at the coats of the men around her appealingly. Suddenly she arose and ran through those who would stop her into the blazing theater. She was brought back alone.

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Stage after the fire.

Musham Finds Wall of Bodies.
Fire Chief Musham, summoned from the investigation about to be called at the city hall, was the first man to reach the second balcony. With a lantern in his hand and a half dozen men behind him he worked his way through the smoke to the top of the theater.

“My God, men, go back,” he shouted, when confronted with a wall of human bodies so high he could not see over them into the door. Then he sent out a call to the public to help carry out the victims.

Ghouls Rob the Dead.
There was a rush for the main entrance. Fathers and brothers were in the crowd. Ghouls were there also. Before the first fifty bodies had been carried from the burning theater a score or more of thieves had commenced searching the piles of dead for loot. They filled their pockets. Rings, bracelets, and watches were taken from the dead. Earrings were even torn from many of the women.

Interior of House a Wreck.
Today the main floor of the theater would make a fair skating rink, were the seats removed. It is covered with ice. Icicles hang from the lights, fixtures, and balconies. The rear wall was bulged several feet and has been propped to prevent its falling.

In taking out the building permit the owners set an estimate of $350,000 as the probable value of the building. The full value when completed is given by men connected with the management at $450,000.

Neither balcony fell. The seats are ruined, the stage a wreck, and the full loss, it is thought, may be $150,000-$200,000.

TAKING AWAY THE DEAD ON COAL, HAY AND FREIGHT WAGONS.

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Morgues Filled and Overflowed.
The downtown morgues, Rolston’s and Jordan’s, were filled long before the tomb had given up its victims. After that bodies were sent to all undertaking rooms within reach, as far south as Eighteenth and Twenty-second streets, as far north as Division street and North Avenue.

The injured were sent largely to the Samaritan and to St. Luke’s hospitals.

Every kind of vehicle was used to transport the bodies of the dead. The injured generally were carried in ambulances or in patrol wagons.

Thompson’s restaurant, on Randolph street, next door to the theater, became an improvised hospital and morgue. Dead and dying were taken there promiscuously.

Doctors Organize Forces.
The doctors, summoned from every downtown office, elected Dr. G. Frank Lydstone, their chief, and under him they worked with both speed and system. Three doctors were assigned to a table, turned for the time being from the restaurant to operating use. As fast as a victim was pronounced dead the body was placed beneath the table and a new patient laid on the boards above.

In spite of the mighty efforts of the physicians, however, many of the injured were dead before they could be given help, and some were alive who were passed by as being dead. The movement of an arm or the twitch of a facial muscle wasa signal several times answered in haste by watching who thought they stood above a corpse.

Dreary Round of Searchers.
In the evening all suspense centered about the morgue. To these places of identification the bodies were carried in wagon loads each wrapped in its banket.

From morgue to morgue went the searchers.

Chicago Tribune, December 31, 1903

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An improvised hospital in Marshall Field & Co.’s store was crowded to its capacity during the fire. The west room and employees’ sitting room on the eighth floor were filled within thirty minutes after the work of the rescue began. The maids in charge of the toilet rooms acted as nurses.

The Inter Ocean, December 31, 1903

Death-Trap At The Main Balcony Exit.

Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1904

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Fireproof Magazine, February, 1904
EDITORIAL: TRUTH ABOUT THE IROQUOIS THEATER
Whether or not the Iroquois Theater is a fireproof building depends upon the interpretation of the term “fireproof.”

The opinion of this journal is that the Iroquois Theater is not fireproof, though it may be what is rather inappropriately termed semi-fireproof.

The owners protest that they incurred a heavy additional expense, the total cost amounting to something over $400,000, in order to render the building absolutely safe. And yet these same gentlemen permitted the introduction of a material in the construction which has been barred by law in the city of Minneapolis as not constituting a fireproof material, and by that we mean cinder concrete.

Cinder concrete is not fireproof and never was, and cannot be rendered fireproof.

When cinder concrete is subjected to the action of continued heat it will be found to disintegrate, or fuse, or collapse .

There were seven collapses of concrete construction during the month of December last, which did not even endure long enough to be tried out in a test by fire.

There is no question but that concrete, that is, good approved concrete, where the practice of the European schools is followed, in allowing it from one to two years to set, where only the best materials are used and when skilled labor is employed, will be found to be a fire retardent; but concrete is not fireproof.

Both the chief of the fire department of Chicago and a representative of the Roebling Company, resident in Chicago, agree that the fire was of very short duration -a sudden and abrupt explosive conflagration, with accompaniment of dense smoke and gas. This fact doubtless accounts for the remarkable preservation of much of the upholstering, both in the balcony and auditorium, beside which were found heaps of the dead.

The furnishing of the stage was not fire- proof. The aisles were inadequate to admit of the easy and rapid passage of those present, and around the boxes where aisles should have been provided there were none. There was a superabundance of wood trim, wire lath and plaster, cheap concrete and other fatal weaknesses which, while not immediately contributing to the disaster, in- volve serious indictment from a building point of view.

The story of the Iroquois, in all its appalling, overwhelming detail, will never be written. The whole truth has been buried in the agony of the death of those who suffered martyrdom within it. Who is responsible?

A legally constituted authority has involved the mayor of Chicago for wretched, feeble enforcement, and, collaterally, non-enforcement of the building ordinances.

The building department of the city of Chicago, whose commissioner has also been bound to the grand jury, has been criticised for years . Not only has the department been utterly incompetent, but there have been repeated and proven charges of cor- ruption and bribery. The occasional discharge of a commissioner under fire, the elevation of a deputy commissioner and another discharge, each followed in turn by some new appointment of somebody else, is the only net result the public has realized in the way of improvement of conditions at the hands of the executive.

The spectacle of the mayor of Chicago censured by one of his own officials, proceeding with a plea for release under a writ of habeas corpus, immediately and complimentarily issued, followed by a jollification and a session of high glee at the city hall, is enough to make the plainest citizen of the western metropolis ashamed of his city and his citizenship.

All of the newspapers of Chicago comment upon the appearance of the mayor wreathed in smiles and receiving the congratulations of his friends, when it has been clearly and unmistakably shown that the responsibility for the Iroquois disaster is not only primarily, but directly, attributable to lax executive methods of those who stood for election to the executive offices, taking therewith their oaths to enforce the law, which oaths they violated, and continue to violate every day in the year by the continued, open and flagrant non-enforcement of the building ordinances of Chicago .

With him in the stocks of public condemnation are the building commissioner and his deputies.

Commissioner Williams explains that he cannot properly discharge the duties of his office because he has not men enough, and that the council will not grant him an increase in the force. Commissioner Williams also excuses himself upon the plea that he has not time enough to properly examine the plans and specifications for buildings which are submitted to him for his official approval.

We venture the opinion that the law does not compel Commissioner Williams to issue a permit for the construction of a building until he is satisfied that everything is right.

But when Commissioner Williams does issue a permit he is under oath that such permit be regularly, properly and rightly issued, to the best of his knowledge and ability, and if some of the permits issued by the commissioner’s office of Chicago are to be taken as an evidence of the knowledge and ability of the building commissioner, it is not a far reach to the conclusion that there is neither knowledge nor ability in the department. It is easy enough for Commissioner Williams to refuse a permit for building construction upon the perfectly rational and natural plea that he has not the time nor the help necessary to issue the permit properly, and had he but the courage to take that position in the matter, and adhere to it, he would have the support both of the people and the press, and would thereby compel adequate provision for the proper administration of his office.

Meanwhile, six hundred people have gone to their deaths as the direct result of the inaction of those who are under oath and who are paid by the public to protect the lives of our citizens.

A long time ago this magazine appealed to the city council of Chicago and to its executive for a more conscientious and competent enforcement of the ordinance relating to building construction, and with a view to reform of the ordinances themselves, an appeal was made for repeal of the inadequate provisions of the building code. Many of the laws relating to building construction now standing upon the statute books of the city were enacted years before the present methods of building came into vogue, and long before the changed conditions rendered repeal necessary as the first step toward fireproof legislation.

The Chicago city council can be safely relied upon at all times to do the worst thing possible. There is a veritable imp of the perverse which seems to dominate that body. Nothing more incompetent, ridiculous and incoherent in the way of legislation could be possible than the new ordinance looking to the fireproofing of theaters.

The most hopeful sign of the season is the action taken by the building committee of the school board at the insistence of Mr. Mundie, the architect of the board. The committee has recommended to the board that a strict regulation be provided to the effect that all public school buildings hereafter erected shall be of absolutely fireproof construction.

All over the United States similar agitation, and, in many cases similar action, has been taken, and it is a commentary upon the aldermanic style of legislation that the school boards have been in almost every case in advance in the enactment of remedial legislation.

What Chicago needs, and what every other city needs, is a little bit of good law and a whole lot of honest enforcement.

The Iroquois Theater disaster, the most appalling which ever occurred in the United States, will be productive of at least some good, and it certainly seems as if the city of Chicago should be the first to repair the wrong that has been done, to punish those responsible for it, and to see to it that there be no possibility of recurrence in the future

Fireproof Magazine, February, 1904

Iroquois Theater Disaster
Nothing in the recorded history of fire has even approximated the appalling total of life loss visited upon the city of Chicago upon the afternoon of December 30 last.

Six hundred human lives sacrificed needlessly and criminally as the result not only of negligence, but of positive malfeasance upon the part of those obligated under oath to enforce the provisions of the city ordinances.

The finding of the coroner’s jury amounts practically to a moral indictment as well as a holding to legal accountability of Mayor
Harrison and his notorious building department, as well as the management of the theater proper, the fire chief and others whose responsibility is more remote.

We quote the following from the finding of the jury:

We hold Carter H. Harrison, as mayor of the city of Chicago, responsible, as he has shown a lamentable lack of force in his efforts to shirk responsibility, evidenced by the testimony of Building Commissioner George Williams and Fire Marshal Wm. H. Musham. As heads of departments under the said Carter H. Harrison, following this weak course, have given Chicago inefficient services, which makes such calamities as the Iroquois Theater horror a menace until the public service is purged of incompetents, and we, the jury, recommend that the said Carter H. Harrison be held to the grand jury until discharged by due course of law.

With a contempt that is beyond comprehension, the recommendation of this jury, which has distinguished itself for fearless, honest and capable discharge of duty, has been refused and practically annulled by a weak judiciary, and the mayor is today practically relieved of the responsibility of answering otherwise than complacently the charges brought against him. What the effect of such procedure must be upon the public service is only too apparent. It amounts to an indorsement by the courts of the criminally weak and lackadaisical methods which have dishonored and besmirched the city department of Chicago for years—with the further and more deplorable future consequence that in the time to come there may again occur equally feeble administration of the law, with equally fearful and appalling consequences .

A review of the evidence before the coroner’s jury in the inquest held on Iroquois fire victims reveals some of the most startling admissions ever brought out before an investigating body. Defects of construction, defects in the interior arrangement and economy of the building were open and
flagrant.

Mr. Marshall, the architect of the Iroquois Theater, during the course of the examination was asked the following question:

Q. “Will you tell us how it happened that the whole proscenium arch was not built of brick?”
A. ” It is all built of brick except the little corners, which give the shape of the arch, and in those corners, if you put brick in there, in case of a fire or anything, the brick will fall, and this Roebling system of wire lath and cement is pronounced much better for the shaping.”

Q. “How do you account, then, that these places where the lath are used, that there is a hole worked clear through on each side of the proscenium arch and the brick wall still remains?”
A. “This fireproofing will probably stand in a very hot fire, which that was, for about ten minutes, but when the water touches it then it crumbles.

And it did. With the exception of some of the bearing members and walls, the system of construction of the Iroquois Theater was of cinder concrete. Cinder concrete was used in the Iroquois Theater in violation of the rule established by Deputy Commissioner O’Shea at the time of the collapse of the Paddington apartment building, which rule, as established for the government of the building department, barred and prohibited the use of cinder concrete as a building material. Fire Chief Musham is authority for the absolute statement that the duration of the fire was less than twenty minutes, and a representative of the Roebling Construction Company, admitted frankly to the writer that while in his opinion the fire continued for a slightly longer time than that, the construction was not subjected to such a continued heat as to amount to a fire test of the construction.

In the light of numerous other cases of collapse of concrete construction, it is not too much to say that had the Iroquois construction been subjected to a continuous fire there would have ensued collapse of the concrete used in the building.

Cinder concrete is the cheapest and worst building material on the market, as evidenced in part by the reproduction in this issue of some half dozen cases of collapse of that substance which occurred during the single month of December last.

It is a very significant fact that the proposed test of the Iroquois construction by building a large fire within the auditorium in order to make a demonstration of the fire-resistant quality of the construction was very conveniently abandoned, ostensibly because of the opposition of the Chicago Board of Underwriters.

The rule of the building department barring the use of cinder concrete was, therefore, violated in the construction of the Iroquois.

What possible pressure could have been brought to bear upon the owners of the property and upon the architect to compel or persuade them to the use of cinder concrete, it would be very interesting to learn. The matter already published descriptive of the Iroquois disaster in its details has been most thorough and exhaustive, but we have not heard one word so far upon the concrete phase of the horror, other than that published herein.

How much worse it might have been let some other say.

Now that it is over, and the graves are covered, we may be prepared for the shifting of responsibility and the escape of those who ought to be hung for what happened. The building ordinances of the city of Chicago will not be enforced. There is nothing in the record to give the slightest color or the most fugitive hope of even an approximate enforcement.

Eighteen months ago a disastrous fire occurred in the Lincoln Hotel on Madison street .

The Lincoln Hotel was a firetrap of the most virulent type, and when fire came there were a dozen or more lives sacrificed as a result of the non-enforcement of the law applicable in that case .

Immediately following that disaster there was a spasm of reform, and a sudden and abrupt and unexpected activity in the vicinity of the city hall and the building department, looking to a proper enforcement of the ordinances applying to hotels, fire-escapes, etc. The Lincoln Hotel was generally condemned, its construction and arrangement denounced by the press, and the hotel practically condemned by the authorities.

It is open to-day—the Lincoln Hotel fire-trap is again open for and doing business—under the same false pretenses which characterized the construction and management at the time of the previous fire.

For this and a multitude of similar reasons, FIREPROOF magazine has neither expectation nor hope of the enforcement ofthe building ordinances, good, bad or indifferent, under the present wretched political conditions.

The new ordinances rushed through by the city council, when put to the test of a legal construction and interpretation, will hold water for about one minute. For instance, one of the provisions reads as follows:
“All theaters hereafter built shall be of fireproof construction.”

And not one word of definition of the term “fireproof construction.” In other words, a positive provision of law, mandatory in character, and yet so worded as to abandon its enforcement, and even its interpretation, to the discretion or personal opinion of whoever may happen to be building commissioner.

As against this sort of legislation, attention is called to the superb and effective building code of Minneapolis, Minn., in which a similar provision is made, but accompanied by and governed by a clear, comprehensive and explicit definition of the term “fireproof construction.”

It is to be hoped that other leading cities of the country, and, perhaps, some day, the city of Chicago, will find ability enough and energy enough and honor enough to enact good building laws, looking to a reform in building methods and to better, safer and stabler building construction, with the result that life and property may be conserved and safeguarded.

If the Iroquois Theater disaster shall prove to have brought about that result it will be a monument and the victims remembered and revered as martyrs to the cause of right and righteous building.

Chicago Tribune, January 2.1904

FIRETRAP AND CHEAPLY BUILT.
“Whole Thing Was of Rush Construction,” Says Editor of “Fireproof” Magazine.
“The Iroquois theater was a fire trap. The whole thing was a rush construction. It was beautiful but it was cheap. Everything but the structural members was of wood; the roller on the asbestos curtain, the pulleys; all a cheap compromise.”

This declaration last evening was made by William Clendenin, 455 Forty-sixth street, editor of the Fireproof magazine.

The stage may be compared to a closet. When you open a closet door the draft is out-ward, not inward. So, when the fire started on the stage the draft pulled it toward the audience. It was a quick flame puff.

The arch, or ceiling. was covered withs cheap concrete. The first puft of flame de stroyed this. It crumbled away, exposing the twisted mass of steel reinforcement and girders, and fell on the audience. This killed many. Looking from below, the bewildered, choking, and maddened crowd thought it was the result of a panic above. They believed the galleries were falling, and, in the rush resulting, many more were killed.

The Iroquois theater was the most talked of construction in the country at the time of its building. It was belleved to be the expres. sion of the most modern ideas in regard to theater building; to be about as near fireproof as one could be. My investigation satisted me that it was one of the worst firetraps in the city. There was so much wood and so much plush and inflammable trimming atoat everything. The insuffleient exits tell the rest of the story.

Fireproof Magazine, November, 1904

Architects’ Experiences in Complying with the New Chicago Theater Ordinance.
The problem presented to the architect by the passage of the new theater ordinances was one which taxed his ingenuity and resourcefulness to the utmost; and added difficulties arose when it involved the reconstruction of a theater already built, with the surrounding space so occupied as to confine the solution along the lines which would not interfere with leases of adjoining space.

Some of the provisions of the ordinances were apparently devised without due consideration, and the results obtained in incorporating them into the remodeled structure were very different from the end aimed at by the framers. The difficulty of obtaining decisions on these items resulted in a system of “cut and try” solution, which had to be submitted to the building department at every step for its approval; a process complicated by the inability of the department for some time after the passage of the ordinance to give definite interpretation of its requirements. This uncertainty was augmented by the attitude of the council, which at first absolutely refused to consider changing the rigid requirements of the original draft. About the first of July, within a few weeks of the time of council adjournment for the summer recess and when the drawings for any alterations which had to be finished by the first of September were of necessity completed, the council began to take up the subject of changing the ordinance. This held the work in a state of uncertainty for some weeks, resulting finally in a few minor changes, which did not materially affect the original requirements. Had there been ample time for the execution of the work, the conditions might have been lighter both for owner and architect, but with September 1 set for the opening and the theatre managers anxious to receive the full income from their property up to the very last minute, there were less than sixty days left for the actual installation of the changes, which involved, in the case of the McVicker theater, for instance, a complete new fireproof stage house and practically an entire rearrangement of the auditorium on all levels, as well as expensive changes in the entrances and stairways. In the case of the McVicker theater, the alterations were so extensive that there was no portion of the premises occupied by the theater undisturbed except the basement, toilet and smoking rooms. Besides which the increased width of stairways necessitated rearrangement on several floors of the office building which adjoins the auditorium to the north.

The alterations required to comply with the ordinances were further complicated by the necessity for meeting the seating requirements of the owners, who naturally lesired to see the income-producing features of their houses maintained intact—where not possible to increase them. This was even more difficult of accomplishment than the constructional alterations, inasmuch as every change required by the ordinance. like widening of aisles, more numerous passages, additional stairways, etc., consumed space, which naturally had to be taken from the auditorium space. This consideration, together with the ordinance requirements for aisles leading directly to exits, or cross aisles in lieu there-of, led to the straight plan of seating—the old circular parquet arrangement sacrificing too many seats to permit of its continuance. This necessitated the reconstruction of the main floor, while the requirements for width of bank, spacing of seats and location of aisles required a similar reconstruction of the balcony and gallery levels .

Not the least of the difficulties encountered was the dissimilarity of arrangement offering solution in the case of the various theaters remodeled. For instance, in no two theatres reconstructed by Holabird & Roche, which included McVicker’s, the Garrick, the People’s and the Academy of Music, was the same solution possible. The general result of the alterations appears, however, to be satisfactory, considering haste and lack of definite information obtainable during the progress of the work.

In the case of the McVicker theater, the number of seats in the completed house is practically identical with those in place in the original building, notwithstanding the ordinance encroachment on seating space. The protective features introduced in complying with the ordinance have undoubtedly secured greatly improved protection to the patrons of the theaters, and it is difficult to see how a serious accident could occur so long as both the spirit and the letter of the law is enforced, as at present. The new covered fire escapes are here shown.

AFTERMATH

Yet some good came out of this tragedy. Lax enforcement of fire regulations became a thing of the past. All Chicago theatres were closed until they passed inspection. The effect spread beyond Chicago to every city in the country, where new ordinances were enacted and old ones enforced, so that theatres have never again been the menace they were before.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Will Davis, Manager of the Iroquois, was later charged and convicted of misfeasance. Chicago’s mayor was also indicted, though the charges didn’t stick. The theater owner was convicted of manslaughter due to the poor safety provisions; the conviction was later appealed and reversed (1907). In fact, the only person to serve any jail time in relation to this disaster was a nearby saloon owner who had robbed the dead bodies while his establishment served as a makeshift morgue following the fire.

The “absolutely fireproof” building survived with minimal damage and was reopened about a year later as the Colonial Theater. The building was torn down in 1924 to make way for the Oriental Theatre. The theatre has been renamed the Ford Center for the Performing Arts.

The Panic Bar
A salesman from an Indianapolis hardware store named Carl Prinzler was supposed to be in the audience that day. However, other business dealings called him elsewhere. In this era it was common for theatres and the like to lock interior and exterior doors to prevent non-paying persons from entering. This also inhibited persons on the inside from exiting. As was the case during the Iroquois Theatre Fire, all doors were locked and/or bolted which prevented patrons from exiting, causing most to be burned alive or succumbing to smoke inhalation. Prinzler was astounded at the enormous and senseless loss of life that night. He sought a way for doors into public facilities to be locked from the outside, but to allow egress from the inside with minimal effort during an emergency. Prinzler tapped into the architectural engineering abilities of Henry H. DuPont to develop a product. In 1908 the first model of a “panic bar” style egress device was released and Vonnegut Hardware Company (Clemens Vonnegut, great-grandfather of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr,) was utilized to market it. Owing to the joint effort to develop and sell the product, it was sold under the name Von Duprin, a combination of the names Vonnegut, DuPont and Prinzler.

The popular 88 Series crossbar exit devices still manufactured by Von Duprin have appear similar to the original design, although significant engineering changes have been made.

Von Duprin continues to manufacture security related products and is a brand of Allegion plc.

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The Panic Bar

Chicago Tribune December 31, 1910
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Seven years after the Iroquois Theater fire, in which 600 persons lost their lives, Chicago’s long planned memorial of the catastrophe was dedicated. The memorial is the new Iroquois Memorial Emergency Hospital at 87 Market Street, which was dedicated yesterday and which was erected with funds raised by the Iroquois Memorial Association.

The afternoon exercises were at the hospital and the evening program was held in the Y.M.C.A. auditorium. The tragedy was recalled by Dr. W. A. Evans, commissioner of health, at almost the exact hour in which it took place, between 3 and 3:30 o’clock.

“We meet here today,” said he, “at the time of day when, just seven years ago, those whose tragic end we commemorate were on their way to death.

“It is well that they should not have died in vain, but that some good should come out of their sacrifice and suffering. Such calamities should make us greater in charity, philanthropy, and blessing. They should make us realize that we are all one family.”

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Turn Hospital Over to City.
President S. H. Regensburg made the dedication address and presented the hospital to the city and its keys to Dr. Evans at the evening session.

R. T. Crane Jr., honorary president of the association, spoke briefly, and was followed by Dr. Gorge J. Tobias on “Need of This Emergency Station.”

Dr. Tobias said he hoped some day the proper influence would rise and bring about a permanent injunction against the use of the scene of the fire for amusement purposes and that a permanent memorial may be raised on the spot instead.

About fifty persons who lost members of their families in the disaster listened to the speaking.

Cares for Downtown Accidents.
As explained by the speakers, the hospital was built to provide instant and free attention to victims of accidents downtown, the lack of which, it was said, was the cause of many of the deaths in the theater fire.

Temporary assistance will be rendered, the capacity being about sixty patients. The building cost about $50,000 and will be ready for occupancy in a short time.¹

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NOTES:

¹ The Iroquois Hospital was torn down in 1951.