Morrison Hotel II

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Morrison Hotel II
Life Span: 1911-1965
Location: SE Corner Madison & Clark Streets
Architect: Marshall & Fox

Chicago Examiner, October 29, 1911

New Hotel Moir to Be Erected on the Site of the Morrison in the Loop

This is the latest picture of the new Hotel Moir, which the Hotel Moir Company will build on the site of the Morrison Hotel, at the southeast corner of Madison and Clark streets, after plans by Marshall & Fox. It will be twenty-two stories high and will front 100 feet on Clark street and 234 feet on Madison street, the greater part of the building having a depth of 190 feet. It will cost $5,000,000.

Inter Ocean, April 10, 1913

Chicago is to have the biggest hotel in the world.

Chicago in plans announced yesterday by Harry G. Moir, owner and proprietor of the Morrison hotel, assured the erection of twenty-one story building at West Madison and Clark streets, which in time will supplant the establishment.

The “new Morrison” will be larger than the recently opened McAlpin hotel in New York.

It will contain 2,500 rooms, each room with a bath. Five hundred will be equipped with shower bath. An elaborately appointed roof garden will be one of the popular features, while a sublimated Boston Oyster house will occupy the entire basement.

Floors For Bachelors.
Among other innovations contemplated are entire floors to be given up to bachelor guests, and another floor will be set aside where bachelor girls may secure moderate priced apartments. Girl bell hops and attendants will be employed exclusively in the feminine zone.

Property on West Madison street as far as the Hartford building has been secured, and when finally completed the hotel will extend on Clark street to the limits of the present structure on West MAdison street to the Hartford building, taking in the “Edelweiss” and picture shows now occupying that space.

The larger plans were made possible through the underwriting of q $2,000,000 bond issue by Graham & Sons, bankers, secured on the leaseholds and proposed building of the Morrison hotel. The building is to be erected in sections, work on the first of which already has begun.

Old Hotel Open While Building.
The old hotel will not cease operating for a single day while the new structure is going up around it. The first section to be built will occupy sixty-seven feet on West Madison street just east of the original Morrison hotel. Caisons for this structure have been laid. This section will be completed within twenty-one months and the second section, on the corner, eight months later.

Marshall and Fox, architects, and designers of the Blackstone hotel and other down town skyscrapers, have been awarded the contract for planning the hotel. The first two floors will be of white Vermont granite. The nineteen stories remaining will be of red brick and white terra cotta.

The old Morrison was built in 1870, and in the early days was the most popular of Chicago’s hostelries. It still enjoys much of its old time popularity, the Boston Oyster house numbering 7,000 customers a day.

Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1928

Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1928

The Morrison hotel, one of the loop s tallest skyscrapers, was selected by Mayor Thompson’s radio commission yesterday as the building on which “Lindbergh Light,” the world’s largest aircraft beacon, should be erected.

In competitive bidding with five other downtown skyscrapers—the Pure Oil, Pittsfield; 333 North Michigan, Mather, and Straus buildings—the Morrison made the winning offer, Ald. A. J. Horan, a member of the commission, announced.

Harry Moir, proprietor of the hotel, agreed to Put up a 200 foot tower, pay the cost of installing the super-search-light, and maintain it, if the city wili furnish the auxiliary machinery. This would cost the city about $20,000.

Light Is Offered Free.
Elmer G. Sperry, president of the Sperry Gyroscope company of Brooklyn. at Mayor Thompson’s aviation congress last December offered to donate the light if mounted and maintained by Chicago. The offer wais placed in the hands of the aero commission which initiated the competitive bidding plan after deciding It would be Impossible to lift it high enough over the municipal airport.

According to Mr. Sperry’s description, the light will be visible to a flyer 250 miles away. It will have a 63 inch lens, several billion candle-power and at full strength will cast a beam of 1,000 candlepower per square millimeter or 100 candlepower brighter than the sun as viewed from the earth at noon on a clear day.

Aid. Horan presented the commission’s report to the mayor with a request that he refer it immediately to the city council with a recommendation that a contract ordinance be drawn up with the Morrison and the necessary $20,000 appropriation passed.

Invite Lindy to Dedication.
It will require two or three months to manufacture the light and several weeks to erect it, Aid. Horan said, but pointed out that work on the supporting tower structure could be started at once, so that the beacon could bo put in place early next summer.

Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, in whose honor the light will be named, will probably be invited hero for dedication. Aid. said. It Is hoped by that time also to have the proposed lake front airport completed so that a double ceremony may be held.

Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1940

The 42-story Morrison hotel at Madison and Clark streets may soon lose a 450 room section of its building due to the hotel’s inability to pay back taxes of $200,000 one that section, it was learned yesterday.

The 1,760 room hotel was constructed in four separate sections. built at different times, on four separately owned parcels of land. The first section of 21 stories was erected In 1911 at a cost of $2,500,000. It contains 450 rooms, and is located at 71 to 79 West Madison.

The second section, containing another 450 rooms, was built a few years later, at the southeast corner of Madison and Clark. This was followed, in 1925. by the third or tower section, of 42 stories, with 860 rooms, fronting at 15 to 29 South Clark. The fourth section. of 450 rooms, located at 67 West Madison, was built in 1930 and 1951.

One Section Already Lost.
The Morrison has already lost one of the sections. The 450 room unit at 67 West Madison, the last section built, was sliced off the building in 1937 to become the Hotel Chicagoan. All openings between this and the adjoining units were bricked up.

Yesterday the heirs of Jacob Rosenberg, who own the land under the original section built in 1911, agreed to sell this unit to the Chicagoan for $675,000 cash unless the Morrison pays the back taxes by Feb. 16. Total back taxes on the entire Morrison hotel units amount to about $700,000.

The unit which the Morrison may lose contains the main entrance to the hotel, the lobby, five banks of elevators, a coffee shop, power plant, and chimney.

Lobby May Be Leased.
It was indicated that negotiations might be carried on later whereby the Morrison could retain the lobby and the utilities by leasing them from the Chicagoan. It would still lose 450 rooms, however, while the Chicagoan’s room capacity would be doubled to 900.

The late Harry Moir, who originally operated the Morrison, leased the 67½ by 190 foot plot under the first on March 30, 1911. The annual ground rent is $38,000, and is not in default. The lease expires in 2007.

Land under the tower section is held by the Chicago Title and Trust company.

The Morrison property was reorganized some time ago under section 77B of the bankruptcy act and the $6.000,000 of bonds scaled down to $3,000,000 of income bonds.

McCahey Heads Company.
James B. McCahey, president of the Chicago board of education, is head of the Morrison Hotel company which was organized to take over and operate the property.

The Chicagoan is owned and operated by the Hotel Chicagoan, Inc., of which John J. Mack is president. C. 0. Wallace and Harry Prince are prominent stockholders.

The Chicagoan is represented in the current negotiations by I. B. Perlman of the law firm of Sabath, Perlman, Goodman and Rein. Robert Becker and Frank D. Mayer of the law firm of Mayer, Meyer, Austrian and Platt are representing the Rosenberg heirs.

Chicago Tribune April 9, 1953

FIRST NATIONAL BUYS 21 STORY HOTEL BUILDING-
Bank Will Use Part for Own Business

By Al Chase
The First National Bank of Chicago yesterday bought for 3 million dollars the 21 story Chicagoan hotel at 63-69 W. Madison st. and will use part of the building for an extension of its business. A bridge will be built across an alley to connect the hotel and bank buildings

The bank purchased the ground leaseholds and building from the La Salle National bank, as trustee. It bought the land under the Chicagoan hotel last year for $1,250,000.

Leased by Morrison
Last February Morrison Hotel corporation acquired the Chicagoan hotel thru a 30 year lease and is reconnecting the building (once an integral part of the Morrison) with the Morrison at every floor. The Chicagoan again will become a part of the Morrison. The Chicagoan has 450 rooms.

First National will occupy for banking purposes the second floor formerly used by the Chicagoan as a lobby and restaurant, and the entrance and stairway from Madison st. to the second floor.

The proposed bridge, for which a permit has been issued by the city, will give a wide connection on the second floor between the present main banking room of First National and the newly ac- quired space.

Another Link Planned
It also is planned to connect the second floor space in the Chicagoan with the second floor of the Hartford building, at the Madison-Dearborn corner, which the bank already owns.

“The intention of the bank is to locate its foreign banking department in the new space in the Chicagoan, and probably its real estate loan department on the second floor of the Hartford building,” a spokesman said.

First National now controls thru ownership or long term leasehold all of the land in the block bounded by Madison, Clark, Monroe, and Dearborn sts.

Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1997

The Boston Oyster House, at the corner of Clark and Madison Streets, offered no fewer than 42 oyster selections, divided among “select,” “New York counts” and “shell oysters.” In 1893, a dozen raw oysters were 25 cents. If you ordered the same dozen fried the price doubled. The most expensive were broiled oysters (60 cents a dozen with celery sauce, or 75 cents with mushrooms).

Also recommended by the guide: the oysters at Burke’s European Hotel, 140 Madison St., and Col. Wilson’s, a bar at 144 Dearborn St., directly across the street from the Tribune, that advertised “shell oysters” in 1880.

Founded in 1875, the Boston served as the training ground for Charles Rector, who went on not only to sell record amounts of fresh shellfish in his own restaurant, but also opened a branchin New York City that became equally celebrated. An 1893 menu from Rector’s lists about 20 cooked oyster preparations plus raw oysters from Rockaway, Blue Point and Shrewsbury.

But Rector’s greatest triumph was Cafe Marine on the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.

The Boston Oyster House survived several changes of ownership and location until it foundered during the Depression.

Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1965

Chicago’s Morrison hotel always had a certain tenuous claim to fame. It was, its owners asserted, “the tallest hotel in the world”—until 1962 when it was overshadowed by the Americana in New York City. And for decades it was celebrated as the Democratic party’s Chicago headquarters, the lair in which aldermen and ward bosses hatched their political plots, the throne from which mayors marshaled their armies, and the palace where visiting monarchs laid them down to rest.

Now the Morrison is doomed, but even in its death it can muster a few superlatives to fling in history’s face. “In addition to being the tallest demolition job in history,” says Fred A. Goldberg, president of the Harvey Wrecking company, “the razing of the Morrison and Hamilton hotels and the old Hartford building will qualify as the largest individual wrecking job ever undertaken in the midwest.” The Hamilton and the Hartford building, along with the Morrison, are condemned to extinction by the First National bank, which intends to erect a new building where the old ones now stand.

“The Morrison alone should provide 25,000 tons of steel salvage and more than 300,000 tons of debris,” says Goldberg, a man with a flare for statistics.

The steel can be sold, but most of the rest will be good for nothing but fill. In their haste to eradicate the Morrison within the 15-month limit, the wreckers will smash most of the ho tel’s structural members into useless junk. “If they gave you enough time,” says Goldberg, “you could practically take these things down for nothing.” But corporations do not have time. The First National wants its new building, and in the meantime must pay taxes on the Morrison. As the Morrison subsides into rubble, its tax liability will decline with it.

Not everyone was qualified to execute the death sentence upon the Morrison. “I know of only three companies that could have posted the performance bond,” says Goldberg, and one of these firms didn’t bid on the job. You have to be big to chop down a 46-story building, and Harvey is about the biggest force in the demolitions profession next to the hydrogen bomb. And the most experienced. “I consider myself the oldest experienced man in this business in the country,” Goldberg admits. He began when he was 15, calculating estimates for his father, who founded the company. “He’d give me the formulas to work out. I was better at mathematics than he was.”

Estimating is the art that enriches wreckers or trundles them off with their own debris. “You use many factors,” says Goldberg. “So many yards of masonry, so many yards of concrete, so many tons of steel, so many feet of lumber.” These commodities must be disassembled, broken into little pieces, and removed from the premises, all without creating undue noise or dust, without tying up traffic, and without dropping bricks on the heads of passing pedestrians.

But you cannot be sure how difficult it will be to dismantle a specific building until you begin bashing it with a pick or a sledge hammer. Then it may transpire that the wall you had supposed was made of nothing but plaster is in fact solid granite and steel. This does not often happen to Goldberg, however, in because he has had a hand razing 90 per cent of the Loop buildings that have fallen during the last 30 years. He knows the architects who designed them and the contractors who built them. From its age and style Goldberg can predict with great accuracy what materials he will encounter and the number of men and machines he must mobilize to take it apart.

Goldberg does not himself wield a pick on these buildings and never has. “I hoped and expected to pursue an academic career,” he says. He majored in history in college, was graduated from the University of Chicago law school, and was already practicing law when he was lured back to his father’s business. “T’ve always loved the wrecking business,” he says. “There’s a great deal of adventure in it.” In 1932 his father was engaged in demolishing the south stands at Wrigley field, and Goldberg went there to look at the job. He never broke away.

In the three decades since, Goldberg and his fellow wreckers in Chicago have developed a destructive technique virtually without peer. “Our method is much safer than the way they do it in New York,” he says, “also more efficient and more economical. In New York they practically skin a building. They cut off the masonry, then come back with iron workers and take the steel structure. They have an ordinance that specifies that no equipment is allowed inside the building.” New York City possesses an intricate system of subterranean pipes and conduits that they fear to damage by driving heavy trucks inside buildings.

Chicago wreckers dismantle buildings from the inside out. In the Morrison, the system will work like this:
The four sub-basements will be shored up, and the lobby floor will be planked with 6-by-12-inch timbers. Into the lobby will roll Goldberg’s trailer trucks, carefully timed so they won’t disrupt traffic outside nor delay work inside, and into the trucks will flow the shattered bricks and tiles and plaster, plunging thru chutes from the upper floors. They won’t plunge straight down from the 46th floor; that would make an abominable noise. So the chutes will descend 10 floors at a leap, then shunt their cargo of rubbish along an inclined slide, then drop again for another 10 floors, pause at another slide, and continue thus to the bottom. Along the route are gates to halt the flow intentionally and access doors to clear blockages that halt the flow accidentally.

Feeding these chutes in the Morrison will be 300 of Goldberg’s men, some of whom will be highly skilled veterans of the wrecking business. There will be, for example, 12 “burners,” specialists armed with acetylene torches who will sever the iron beams and columns. These columns contain astonishing amounts of steel, as much as 1,000 pounds per lineal foot in the sub-basement members that support the weight of the entire hotel. There will be eight timekeepers and three general superintendents and a platoon of crane op-erators, loaders, and truck drivers. There will be hook men who hook hoisting cables around piles of beams and lumber and flag men who direct truck traffic and on every floor a water boy (“You can’t have men walking down 20 floors every time they want a drink”).

The building will be piped for water, partly to dampen the rubble and lay the dust because the city takes a jaundiced view of dust. It will also be piped for compressed air to run the jack hammers and wired for electricity to run the cranes. Many of the hotel’s components-like the 2-ton elevator motors in the top of the tower-cannot merely be shoved off the edge with a lusty “Look out below!” They must be eased down with hoists, and here again the unique Morrison job presents a unique problem. “The average hoist doesn’t have a drum with a big enough cable capacity to lower these motors,” says Goldberg.

There will be men to run the hoists and men to run the elevators and men to scoop up the stray bits oi wreckage and carry them off in wheelbarrows, tho most of the debris will move to the chutes on a conveyor belt. Linking this vast array of destroyers will be both telephones and walkie-talkies to transmit voices from the fourth sub-basement, 30 feet below the water table, to the 46th floor, a distance of 701 feet.

Of all the trades represented, none is more arduous and downright terrifying than that of the wall picker. This is the man who demolishes brick walls, usually with an ordinary pick, but sometimes with a sledge or a little de vice that looks like a tack hammer. Sometimes the wall picker works on, a scaffold. “This building will be encased in scaffolding,” says Goldberg, tho a few of the walls that look down upon air shafts or alleys will remain unscaffolded. Standing on the scaffolding outside the building, the wall picker will shove the bricks inward. That’s easy. He’ll even be partly sheltered by tarpaulins stretched behind him, not out of concern for his comfort but to restrain the dust.

But frequently the wall picker must balance unsupported atop the very wall he’s demolishing. That wall will generally be no wider than 18 inches and may be as narrow as a single course. of bricks. There is nothing beside him or above him to wnich be could cling if he began to fall, and at the edge of his foot there is nothing but emptiness and the ground, 20 stories or 30 below him. He stands there, silhouetted against the sky, and with his pick or sledge hammer hacks at the crumbling bricks upon which he stands. He wears the construction worker’s protective hard hat, but this would afford him scant comfort in a 20-story fall, even if he were lucky enough to land on his head. For this he gets $3.24½ an hour, union scale, plus an extra 50-cents an hour if he’s taking down a high stack. A burner makes $3.29½, and a jack hammer man makes $3.42. Common laborers get $2.89½. Almost all the men are Negroes, and no matter what their job classification, they work doggedly at it. Despite a good deal of assistance from machinery, much physical labor remains, hard, grinding toil performed in a gray world of plaster dust and broken lath.

Understandably, men sometimes get killed in this pursuit, tho not as many as in the bad old days of the wrecking business, before Harvey was founded. Back in the reign of Woodrow Wilson, Chicago developed a mania for tearing itself down, and the thud of the wrecker’s pick was heard all over the city. Most of the picks then were swung by Macedonians and Serbs, hardy immigrants from around the area that today is called Yugoslavia. They spoke no
English, and they worked and died like dogs—for 17 cents an hour, sometimes less. Steve Velco, himself a Macedonian and now a superintendent for Goldberg, made 12½ cents an hour when he started in 1914. In 1916 he was promoted to wall picker, and by 1920 he was bossing gangs of Macedonians.

“We had a foreman,” Velco recalls, “bossed 70, maybe 80 men. He drove them like animals. He’d walk along, every few minutes he’d write out a ticket, hand it to a man, say, ‘Go get your pay.” The man had been working maybe an hour, made only 17 cents. He’d have to walk out to the office, 1500 west, to get his 17 cents. Men were scared. They worked so hard their clothes were white from the salt in their own sweat.” Most of them went back to Europe as soon as they’d saved enough money, and many of those who escaped death beneath the tumbling walls of Chicago’s superannuated buildings died instead in the army of some forgotten emperor or archduke.

But Velco stayed on, surviving repeated falls and frequently breaking his bones (he walks with a slight limp today). He bossed almost every major wrecking job in the Loop. He would stride back and forth atop a truncated wall, firing off commands heavily laced with the Macedonian idiom. The Macedonians had no difficulty understanding him, but the Negroes who fell heir to the wrecking business are occasionally left in doubt. A veteran now of 30 years with Harvey, Velco is a happy, smiling, friendly man de spite the bitter years he saw. And he’s put two sons thru college. He couldn’t have done that in Macedonia.

Wreckers have a union now and decent, humane bosses like Goldberg and Velco, but there remains a sense of dejection in the wrecking business along with the drama and the little-boy rapture of making things come crashing down with a bang and a cloud of dust. In a disaster-in war or fire or flooda building can die with dignity. But in the wrecking business, a building perishes bit by bit, blinking with embarrassment as the pickers strip away its walls and let the sunlight glare upon its once private cham-bers.

Last month Goldberg’s men tore down five outworn buildings at Franklin and Quincy streets in the heart of the garment district. Whole wails were torn away to bare the drab caverns where for many years the cutters and sewing machine operators had bent to their work. Now nothing remained but rubble—broken bricks, lath from which nails protruded, and shards of glass. Painted on the few surviving doors and windows were the names of the last tenants: the Adier Blouse and Sportswear company, the Oriental Belt company, and King Louie Bowling Shirts. A great hole had been cut thru every floor from the eighth story into the basement, and down this hole the laborers were dumping wheelbarrow loads of debris. A hose played constantly on the wreckage at the bottom of the pit, laying the dust and ghosts of 65 years.

Now it is the turn of the Morrison hotel. The auctioneer has already removed the furniture and the 500 ceramic spitoons that were discovered in a walled-up alcove. The decorative casings have been torn down from the doorways, the toilets uprooted from the bathrooms, the carpeting ripped up and carried away. The expense-account executives, the honeymoon couples, the Democratic politicians have moved to other hotels. Only the wreckers are in residence now, and even they will not pause there long.

New Hotel Moir to Be Erected on the Site of the Morrison in the Loop

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