John R. Schmidt

Finding your way in Chicago's present

By: John R. Schmidt | Jan. 11, 2013

Jan. 11, 2013
 

How well did you find your way around 1952 Chicago?

We are in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, on 51st Street a few blocks east of Ashland. In 2013 the ribbon commercial strip is mostly gone, with many of the lots vacant. Meanwhile, the city has spruced up the streetscape a bit by planting trees along the sidewalk parkways.

The main clue to the location is the trolley bus.  Only two trolley bus lines ever operated on the South Side--the other was 47th Street. In the distance, the steeple of the former St. Martin Lutheran Church is also visible.   

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Finding your way in Chicago's past

By: John R. Schmidt | Jan. 10, 2013

Jan. 10, 2013
How well could you find your way around the Chicago of the past?
 
This 1952 photo was taken on the South Side--for purpose of the quiz, that's somewhere east of Western, between Cermak and 79th. The physical surroundings have changed greatly over sixty years, though there are a couple of clues that can help identify the site.
 
If you think you know the location, send in your guess as a Comment. I'll post a contemporary photo tomorrow.
 

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Chicago's 1901 'Super Bowl'

By: John R. Schmidt | Jan. 8, 2013

Jan. 8, 2013

It’s 1901 and it’s winter. The football season has ended, and baseball is just a memory. Only Canadians care about hockey. You say there’s a new sport called basketball?

But there’s big sports news in Chicago this January 8. The first national bowling championships are being held here.

Americans had played various forms of bowling since colonial times. In 1895 a group of New York clubs founded the American Bowling Congress. They drew up a list of standard rules and equipment specs.

Within a few years, bowling clubs in other cities joined the ABC. Now there was talk about having a tournament to decide who the country’s best bowlers were. Chicago was given the honor of hosting the first ABC Tournament in 1901. 

The Chicagoans leased the second floor of a warehouse at Wabash and Randolph. Six bowling lanes were donated by Brunswick, an equipment manufacturer eager to promote the sport.

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Emma Goldman's Chicago Hideout

By: John R. Schmidt | Jan. 7, 2013

Jan. 7, 2013

Chicago has many unmarked historic sites. The building at 2126 North Sheffield Avenue is another of these. In September ’01 the hunt for America’s most wanted terrorist ended here.

No, that wasn’t 2001 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. We’re talking about 1901. The alleged terrorist was Emma Goldman. She was accused of conspiring to murder the President of the United States.
 
On September 6, in Buffalo, President William McKinley had been shot and seriously wounded. The gunman was an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. He told police that he’d been inspired to his deed by Emma Goldman. 
 
At 32, the Russian-born Goldman was already famous–or infamous–as an organizer and promoter of radical-left causes. Czolgosz had heard her speak in Chicago the previous July.

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The Stock Yards

By: John R. Schmidt | Jan. 3, 2013

Jan. 3, 2013

Carl Sandburg called Chicago the “Hog Butcher for the World.” He wrote those words in 1916, celebrating the city’s great stock yards. The yards were the place where live animals were slaughtered, so that they can be turned into packaged meat for consumption.

During the 1850s Chicago was becoming a railroad center. That made our city the final destination for the cattle the cowboys were driving to Dodge City and Abilene and Wichita and all those wild towns you used to see in the Western movies. At first there were many little stock yards around Chicago near the different railroad lines.

In 1861 the Civil War broke out. Meatpacking boomed. With the industry outgrowing those small scattered sites, a group of railroads got together to build a consolidated facility. They settled on a location near the edge of the city, at Halsted and 39th (Pershing). 

The Union Stock Yards began operations on December 25, 1865. The holiday date was not planned. Christmas Day happened to be when the first shipment of hogs arrived. 

After the yards were established, Swift and Armour and the other packers opened plants in the area.

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Losing Bushman, a Chicago icon

By: John R. Schmidt | Jan. 1, 2013

Jan. 1, 2013

New Year’s Day 1951.

Time magazine had called him “the best known and most popular civic figure in Chicago.” Now he was dead, and the city mourned.

His name was Bushman. He was a gorilla.

Bushman was a two-year-old, 38-pound baby when he was brought to Lincoln Park Zoo in 1930. He had been purchased from a West African missionary for $3,500. Gorillas were still a rarity in America, and Bushman was soon drawing crowds.
 
Things were pretty casual in the beginning. Visitors to the zoo would often see Bushman and his keeper tossing a football around on the park lawn. But as the gorilla grew bigger and less docile, he had to be kept locked in his cage. Bushman eventually topped out at 6'2" and 547 pounds.
 
Despite living his life in captivity, Bushman had a sunny disposition. He was gentle to the mice he might catch and he never attacked a keeper. Reclining in his cage, he munched grapes like a Roman emperor while downing endless quarts of milk. School children loved him.

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The Great Panic of New Year's Eve 1999

By: John R. Schmidt | Dec. 31, 2012

Dec. 31, 2012

Remember December 31, 1999?

Okay, I hear you. And I'm with you--sometimes I have trouble remembering thirteen days ago, let alone thirteen years ago.

But thirteen years ago today, Chicago and the rest of the world were preparing for the Turn of the Millennium. We were also preparing for a possible catastrophe called Y2K.

“Y2K” was short for Year 2000, and the problem was with computers. Computer programmers had long been rendering years with the last two digits only. For example, “63″ was used in place of 1963. It was a way of saving bits on the computer. 

So what would happen when 1999 clicked over into 2000? Would computers think we were moving back in time to 1900? Then anything electronic might go crazy! 

Massive power failures! Financial records gone! Elevators crashing! Planes falling from the sky! Missiles being launched by mistake! During the late 1990s, a whole industry of Y2K-fixers sprang up.

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Black Chicago at Mid-Century

By: John R. Schmidt | Dec. 28, 2012

Dec. 28, 2012

It was December 1949, and the 20th Century was reaching its mid-point. On this date the Tribune began running a series of articles by reporter Carl Wiegman about a group that was becoming increasingly visible and important—Chicago’s African-Americans.

In 1910 the city’s Black population had been 44,000. By 1940 the number had grown to 277,000, and was projected to rise to about 400,000 in 1950–over 10 percent of Chicago’s population. That was a significant number of people. They could no longer be ignored.

Housing was the number one problem. True, the number of African-Americans in the city had kept growing and growing and growing. But because of segregation, they were still crammed into the narrow “Black Belt” on the South Side.

Unscrupulous landlords had taken advantage of the situation. Countless old apartment buildings had been chopped up. A former six-flat might now have twenty or more kitchenettes.

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