The cholera epidemic of 1849 was followed by a severe outbreak of typhoid fever in 1850.  With work on the planking of the roads addressing the sewage problem, the public began agitating for an improvement in the supply of drinking water:

“At first, water was pumped in from the lakeshore, to be stored in a cistern and then piped through hollow logs.  In rough weather the water would be muddy.  Neighborhood wells were often contaminated.  Many houses purchased their potable water by bucket or barrel from water-carts.” 

That was, until 1842, when a private company, the Chicago Hydraulic Company, began pumping lake water from an intake at the foot of Lake Street, located a mere 320′ into the lake, into a reservoir from which it was distributed through a crude system of wooden supply pipes to roughly 20% of the population, all located in the South Division.  More importantly, the intake in the lake was only two blocks downstream from the mouth of the Chicago River, the city’s primary sewer.

Public concern over a potential repeat cholera outbreak eventually forced the state legislature on February 15, 1851, to incorporate the Chicago City Hydraulic Company, a public corporation with the charge of improving the city’s water supply.  Also created was a Board of Water Commissioners, led by the G&CU’s Superintendent John B. Turner, who immediately hired his Chief Engineer, William McAlpine, as the board’s engineer. (In the mist of this furor, Turner would be thrown into the presidency of the G&CU following Ogden’s resignation on June 2.)  In September 1851, McAlpine presented a plan for a new water system for the city, sized to take it to the year 1875, in which he estimated that the population would reach 162,000 (Chicago passed this mark in 1864).  The plan called for a new pumping station and inlet to be located north (upstream) of the mouth of the river at the foot of Chicago Avenue, to minimize any potential contamination from the river via the lake’s southerly current.  Three new reservoirs, one in each division, would also be built in order to ensure a continuous supply.  

The municipal election on March 2, 1852, therefore, was a referendum on two issues that intimately involved the city’s relationship with its greatest natural resource: the lake.  In addition to the Illinois Central’s proposed solution to the erosion of the lakefront, the voters were also being asked to support the proposed water works.  Of the 4,445 votes, only 513 were against the plans.  Confronted by the threat of a public-supported competitor, however, the owners of the private Chicago Hydraulic Company threatened an injunction against this scheme unless their interests and long-term debt were bought out by the city.  The argument between the two companies was dwarfed, however, by the return of an even greater outbreak of cholera in 1852 when 630 people died from the disease.  That summer during the height of the epidemic, the city settled the water company issue out of court and a wooden crib 20’ by 40’ was sunk 600’ from the shore into the lake, from which a wooden inlet carried the water to a 25’ deep well dug inland.  Construction of a new pumping station, in which was erected a steam-powered pump above the well, and water tower began soon after.  Both structures were completed in the summer of 1853, with the first supply of water being delivered in February 1854.  The three-stage tower was a brick structure with a height of 136.’  In plan it was a square with sides of 14′ at the base, telescoping to 11′ in the top stage.  The interior of the tower was divided by a wall into two chases, one occupied by the system’s iron standpipe, the other by the steam engine’s chimney.  The heavy structure was erected on a foundation of a bed of sand, placed 6′ below grade.  Typical of Chicago’s early towers, the structure eventually settled 14″ out of plumb. Andreas recorded that it was brought back into vertical “by an ingenious method.”

As excavation on the pumphouse got under way, the company also bought the land for the three reservoirs.  The South Division’s was located along the southern frontage of Adams Street, between La Salle and Clark that was purchased from Philip F. W. Peck for $8,750 in June 1852.  The circular brick structure was completed in November 1854, with a height sufficient to hold the top of the stored water at an elevation 75′ above grade.  On November 22, the reservoir was filled to a depth of 28,’ just 10′ short of the top.  An inspection the following morning revealed that the masonry tank had sustained a series of cracks as the weight of the contained water had forced the reservoir to settle at different intervals over its foundation.  The tank was immediately emptied, and a series of repairs were studied.  The tank was eventually reinforced with iron braces and rods to allow it to be used during the upcoming winter, and further strengthened the following June so that it could at least hold a depth of 18,’ less than half of its planned capacity.  The other two reservoirs in the North and West Divisions were completed in 1858.

These early attempts at improving Chicago’s extremely unhealthy physical conditions were too few and too late, however, to prevent the massive onslaught of the 1854 cholera epidemic.  On June 29, as the new water tower and its corresponding system was being fine-tuned and construction on the South Division’s water reservoir was moving toward completion, a train pulled into town that contained a number of Norwegian immigrants bound for Wisconsin.  Unfortunately, the disease was rampant among this group, six having already died on the train en route.  In spite of appropriate quarantine precautions, within a week of the scourge’s arrival, the mortality rate in Chicago due to cholera skyrocketed to 60 persons a day.  The city’s streets were especially clogged with hearses on July 8 and 9, leading to a general exodus from the city on the following Sunday.  Many retreated to Milwaukee in hope of escaping from the pestilence.  The final body count in 1854 reached 1,424, two percent of the total population, giving Chicago the unenviable record of having the highest death rate due to cholera in the country that year.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Heise, Kenan and Michael Edgerton, Chicago: Center for Enterprise. Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications, 1982.

Masters, Edgar Lee. The Tale of Chicago. New York: Putnam, 1933.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– II. New York: Knopf.  1940.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

All was not as serene down below along the streets of Chicago as depicted in this bird’s eye view, however, as construction on the cathedral drew to a close during the autumn of 1854.  The city had just finished burying the last of the 1424 victims of Chicago’s worst cholera epidemic, and finally, it seemed, that city leaders were going to launch a serious campaign to address the root causes of Chicago’s unsanitary environment. Not that the reasons were very hard to discern, for even with the scientific knowledge of 1854, the average resident of Chicago knew ‘that something was rotten’ in Chicago:

“To any intelligent person going about our city, who understands the physical conditions of health, and the causes which, with mathematical certainty generate disease, the wonder is not that we have had cholera in our midst for two seasons in succession, and that the common diseases of the country are fatally prevalent during the summer months, but that a worse plague does not take up a permanent residence with us.  Many of the populous localities are noisesome quagmires, the gutters running with filth at which the very swine turn up their noses in supreme disgust. Even some portions of the planked streets, say, for instance, Lake between Clark and La Salle, are scarcely in better sanitary condition than those which are not planked.  The gutters at the crossings are clogged up, leaving standing pools of an indescribable liquid, there to salute the noses of passers by.  There being no chance to drain them properly, the water accumulates underneath the planking, into which flows all manner of filth, and during the hot weather of the last few weeks, the whole reeking mass of abominations has steamed up through every opening, and the miasma thus elaborated has been wafted into the neighboring shops and dwellings, to poison their inmates…. The evil, though great and increasing, is yet susceptible of a remedy.  The only condition of health and decency, is a regular, thorough system of drainage.  Such a system is feasible, and must be adopted if the “Garden City” is to be habitable… “

In 1849, an earlier cholera epidemic had claimed over 300 victims.  Since the city’s founding water had been obtained from the lake, the river, backyard wells, or watercart vendors.  House drains still emptied onto the streets that, in all honesty, were nothing more than open surface sewers.  The few street gutters that actually were in place tried to slope to the river in an attempt to utilize gravity to empty them.  Most streets were not paved, however, so the accumulated sewage and animal waste, imperceptibly but inevitably disappeared into the mud of the street.  In addition, many of the city’s streets were not even lit until construction began in October 1849, following the subsidence of the cholera plague, on a gas lighting system by the Chicago Gas Light and Coke Company, whose Board of Directors included George Smith, Mark Skinner, and Thomas Dyer.  The gasworks were located on the south side of Monroe near Market Street, ostensibly to have a wharf on the South Branch to unload the great quantities of coal it would require.  Night illumination began on September 4, 1850, with the Gem of the Prairie reporting that “the City Hall with its thirty-six burners, is the brightest of all, night being transformed into mimic day.”

At the height of the cholera outbreak in 1849, Chicago’s population was 23,047.  During the five intervening years the population had almost tripled to 65,872, but nothing had fundamentally changed either in Chicago’s system of supplying drinking water or in its method of removing human and animal waste (if the population had tripled, surely the number of horses on the city’s streets had also correspondingly increased).  As the city continued to grow, the physical reality of the flatness of Chicago’s geography, at first an embarrassing nuisance, was quickly becoming a existential threat to the town’s survival.  Meanwhile, the city’s factories and packing houses, that had located adjacent to the river for easy access to water, were also using the river to drain their refuse.  

“In the spring and early summer it was impossible to keep the young fish out of the reservoir, and it was no uncommon thing to find the unwelcome fry sporting in one’s washbowl, or dead and stuck in the faucets.  And besides they would find their way into the hot-water reservoir, where they would get stewed up into a very nauseous fish chowder.”

Therefore, the core environmental problem facing Chicago’s leaders was two-fold:

            1. the condition of Chicago’s streets, sidewalks, and ‘sewers’ was abominable, and

            2. the river, the city’s main sewer, flowed directly into the lake, the source of the city’s drinkable water, where the southerly current of the lake carried the contamination the short distance of two blocks from the mouth of the river to the inlet of the city’s only water company located at the foot of Lake Street.  Chicago, bounded by Lake Michigan and defined by the Chicago River and its branches, was caught in a vicious circle that had to be broken, for, indeed, there was “water, water, everywhere, but not a [decent] drop to drink.”

Chicago’s primary problem was its geography.  The South Division, west of State Street was, for all practical purposes flat, being only 3-4 feet above the surface of the river.  There was no natural drainage of the land because there was little slope toward the river.  The indigenous soil structure had only compounded this problem. With no surface slope, any liquid, be it rain, snow melt, or human or animal waste, had no place to go but down, that is, until it reached the hardpan, that prevented any further absorption.  The end result was that Chicago’s unpaved streets and sidewalks had but one method of drainage: evaporation; with the result that the city’s streets and walks were virtual swamps during the spring thaw and rainy season or following a prolonged rainfall, having the same effect on all who tried to negotiate them, be they human or animal:

“I said we had no pavements in 1848.  The streets were simply thrown up as country roads.  In the spring for weeks, portions of them would be unpassable.  I have at different times seen empty wagons and drays stuck on Lake and Water Streets on every block between Wabash and the river.  Of course there was little or no business doing, for the people of the city could not get about much, and the people of the country could not get in to do it.  As the clerks had nothing to do, they would exercise their wits by putting boards from dry goods boxes in the holes where the last dray was dug out, with significant signs, as ‘No Bottom Here,’ ‘The Shortest Road to China.’  Sometimes one board would be nailed across another, and an old hat and coat be fixed on it, with the notice ‘On His Way to the Lower Regions.'”

The first serious attempt to improve the drainage of the streets had occurred in 1846 when Common Council voted to dig Lake and Randolph Streets deeper in an attempt to remove some of the offending muck, as well as to impart an encouraging slope towards the river.  Rudimentary sluices were formed at the sides of the streets into which it was hoped the houses could empty their sewage.  To permit pedestrian passage above these canals of filth, wooden sidewalks over the ditches were constructed, that, unfortunately, only began to compound the problem:

“Under sagging wooden sidewalks lived “millions of rats” which at night regarded the streets as “their domain”; and “old boots, shoes, spoiled meat and fish, the garbage of the kitchens, dead dogs, cats, and rats” befouled the places where man must walk.  Even when attempts to clean the streets were made, the refuse was not always carried away but simply pushed aside.  And not always were sidewalks cleared, although from the ‘thirties hindrances to a traveler’s progress were forbidden… Nature’s obstructions to free and safe movement seemed bad enough, but to encounter overenthusiastic merchants hawking their goods in the manner of “Chatham street” on some of the main avenues was more than some citizens could bear.  And the wandering cow perpetuated a rural atmosphere striking incongruous amidst the signs of urban sophistication.  To wade ankle deep in mud and water so that he felt as if he were crossing “a Rubicon” was the lot of the pedestrian during wet weather in parts of the town where streets were unpaved.  And where sidewalks were laid, teamsters frequently monopolized them to avoid “the sticky and Styx-like” roadways.”

This “attempt to make a second Venice” of Chicago’s streets, fortunately, was wisely stopped by an injunction filed by those who saw the folly inherent in digging Chicago deeper into its morass; the channelized streets were quickly refilled.

During the winter of 1848-49, cholera had been making its way up the Mississippi River valley from New Orleans, its spread thought to have been initiated by the arrival of recent immigrants.  Under the threat of the inevitable arrival of the disease in Chicago, municipal leaders tried to clean up the city to minimize the odds of an epidemic by experimenting with a new paving technique purported to have been successful in New York City and Canada: the plank road.  In essence, the wooden sidewalks would be increased in scale to cover the entire street.  On January 22, 1849, Common Council ordered that Lake Street, the town’s central shopping district, be planked from State Street west to the river.  With the high point of State Street running north-south and Madison Street running east-west, a series of graded elevations was set so that the streets would drain into the lake towards the east, into the river on the north and west, and to an undetermined location in the south.  In addition to Lake Street, the other major east/west roads in the business district, S. Water and Randolph Streets, were planked that year in the following manner: the streets were cut to a level 18″ below the adjoining lots so that the houses could easily empty their sewage into the road, then timber rails were placed on the ground with 3″ thick planks laid on top of these. 

The end result was that these streets were still open sewers, and as such, were nothing more than a larger version of the city’s infamous wood sidewalks, that only worsened the septic character of Chicago’s streets: 

“Under these planks the water was standing on the surface over three-fourths of the city, and as the sewers from the houses were emptied under them, a frightful odor was emitted in summer, causing fevers and other diseases, foreign to the climate…^“

Unfortunately, the planking did not prevent the onset of cholera in 1849, which arrived on April 29, when the John Drew, a boat carrying immigrants from New Orleans, docked in town.  During the height of the epidemic, July 25-August 28, the disease infected over 1000 people, of which 314 eventually succumbed.  The following year someone pointed out the problem in making the streets act as sewers so that the north/south streets were planked in a different manner.  Rather than excavate the streets so that adjacent lots would naturally drain onto the street, sewers with a triangular cross-section made of oak planks were laid in the middle of Wells, La Salle, Clark, and State Streets that ran from Randolph to the river.  The planking was placed on the street surface without any major change in the existing elevation.

At first, the technique appeared to work, so during the next two years over ten miles of streets in the South Division had the wooden boards applied to their surface.  But exposed to the yearly cyclical nature of Chicago’s climate, the wood began to rot while at the same time it was being worn down by the constant contact of heavily loaded wagon wheels and teams of horses.  Before long, the planked streets became waiting booby-traps as the rotting boards would snap without warning with a resulting one-two punch: first, the broken plank would rise into the air, often slapping a horse in the face; then on the way down, the falling missile would crash into the muck below, splashing any innocent bystander with the ungodly effluent.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Cronon, William, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, Norton, New York, 1991.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch,  1942.

Heise, Kenan and Michael Edgerton, Chicago: Center for Enterprise. Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications, 1982.

Lewis, Lloyd and Henry Justin Smith. Chicago: The History of its Reputation.  New York: Blue Ribbon, 1929.

Mayer, Harold  M., and Richard C. Wade. Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis. Chicago: University   of Chicago Press, 1969.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– II. New York: Knopf.  1940.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

No sooner had the Baptist’s started construction on the city’s tallest steeple, then did the Roman Catholics (who, ironically had started the race ten years ago with St. Mary’s Cathedral) announce their intention to end the race once and for all with the erection of a new Cathedral that was to sport a central tower of gargantuan proportions, topping off at a record 245.’ The site for the new church, however, was not in nor even near the vicinity of Church Row, but at what was then the fringe of Chicago’s northern limits: the block bounded by Wolcott (State), Superior, Chicago, and Cass (Wabash) that had been given to the Diocese by Ogden and Newberry in 1840 in exchange for the Council votes in favor of the Clark Street bridge. The Catholic population in the Northern District had steadily increased ever since a small, framed church, the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, was erected at the corner of Rush and Superior in 1849 by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Kinsella.  By 1853, the congregation had grown so fast that Kinsella pursued the construction of a new permanent building.  Bishop Van de Velde not only concurred with Kinsella’s request but decided that the new building should become the Cathedral for Chicago, replacing St. Mary’s upon its completion.  The design of Holy Name Cathedral, what was to be Chicago’s largest church and second most expensive building after the newly completed Courthouse, however, was not entrusted to Van Osdel, the architect of all the Protestant churches, but to two young, relatively newcomers (who were more than likely Catholic) in Chicago’s architectural community, Edward Burling and Frederick Baumann.

Burling was a native-born carpenter/architect who had moved to Chicago from Newburgh, New York, in 1843 at the age of 24.  Like Van Osdel, he had been trained as a carpenter and quickly became a contractor upon his arrival.  His first experience with a serious architectural project had been as the construction superintendent of Van Osdel’s new Tremont House in 1850.  Enticed by the demand of the building boom in the early 1850s, Burling followed Van Osdel’s example and tried his hand at designing buildings, believing he had “an inborn taste for architecture.”  In 1852, he formed a partnership with Frederick Baumann, a twenty-six-year-old German architect/builder who had arrived in Chicago only two years earlier.  The contrast between the professional backgrounds of these two could not have been more divergent.  Whereas Burling’s was typical for America’s first generation of homegrown, self-taught architects, Baumann had not only formally studied European architecture and building at the Royal Academy in Berlin but had grown up in the sophisticated architectural culture of Prussia that at the time admired the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel.  Upon his arrival as an immigrant in Chicago in 1850, he procured a position in Van Osdel’s office at the time the Courthouse project, Chicago’s most important building, was getting started (which may help explain some of the building’s “academically-correct” detailing and its resemblance to Sant’ Andrea).  Two years later, with the completion of the Courthouse project approaching, he left Van Osdel to join forces with Burling in the design of the cathedral.

The Cathedral’s cornerstone was laid on August 3, 1853, less than a month after the Baptists had done likewise.  Burling & Baumann chose to ignore the recently completed all-stone designs of Renwick’s Second Presbyterian Church and Van Osdel’s Courthouse in favor of the more conventional brick for the Gothic Revival exterior of the church’s rather square, very long 84′ by 190′ body.  They did not, however, choose to use Chicago’s locally produced brown brick, but instead, imported brick from Milwaukee that was renowned for its “cream” color. This gave the Cathedral of the Holy Name, that was completed in the fall of 1854 (except for the overly-ambitious tower that was never completed) and dedicated that Christmas, a distinctive light color that would have softened the building’s already out-of-scale, monumental presence in the city’s skyline.  Nowhere was this more evident than in a serene crayon drawing published in New York by the Smith Brothers that attempted to record how Chicago appeared in 1856.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch,  1942.

Industrial Chicago-vol. 1: The Building Interests. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1891.

Tallmadge, Thomas Eddy. Architecture in Old Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.

Zukowsky, John, Chicago Architecture 1872-1922: Birth of a Metropolis, Munich, 1987.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

Before the new Courthouse was occupied on February 7, 1853, the Courthouse Square witnessed another disastrous fire.  On October 20, 1852, workmen were reshingling the roof of the First Baptist Church.  Sparks from a pipe of one of the workers apparently ignited the wooden roof, starting a fire that totally destroyed the church.  The next day, however, the congregation voted to build an even larger building on the site, the cornerstone of which was laid on July 4, 1853.  Although the architect of the new church is not recorded, the design bore sufficient resemblances to the churches designed by Van Osdel that it could be credited to his hand.  The disaster not only gave the Baptists a second chance to regain the title of the city’s tallest steeple (that they had once briefly held in 1845 when the original 112′ steeple was completed), but urbanistically, it also offered the designer the opportunity to design the new building as a symmetric “bookend” to balance the new First Presbyterian Church at the opposite corner of the block, as viewed from the new Courthouse.  The new steeple rose six feet higher than that of the Second Presbyterian’s to a height of 170.’  (If Van Osdel was the architect, this design could have been the one he originally produced for the unbuilt Second Presbyterian Church.)

The body of the new Baptist building echoed the simple, box-like form of the First Presbyterian Church, including the flat roofed-cornice capped with a parapet wall.  Gone was the grand colonnaded portico of the destroyed church, undoubtedly a victim of the need for more interior space on the relatively shallow lot, the freestanding columns being transformed into two-story pilasters.  In an apparent attempt to rectify the abrupt placement of the First Presbyterians’ tower, the designer of the Baptists’ facade incorporated a shallow pediment over the center bay, that marked the entry as well as helped to integrate the steeple with its supporting bay with the body of the building.  This detail, the shallow pediment supported by pilasters within the center bay of the elevation, bore a striking similarity to Van Osdel’s treatment of the Courthouse, just across the street.  This fact, coupled with the other formal resemblances that the new First Baptist Church had with Van Osdel’s other churches, lends credence to the supposition that Van Osdel was the architect of the church, that first opened its doors on November 12, 1853.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch,  1942.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

By 1851, Chicago’s boom was approaching full throttle (Ogden’s G&CU was pushing westward and the MC and MS were racing each other to the state line.)  Since the Municipal Building/Market Hall had opened in 1848, 10,000 more people had moved to Chicago, increasing its population by 50% to 29,963.  In just three short years, the city government had outgrown its new market building.  The situation with the new county Courthouse was the same.  The recent construction of the monumental new Protestant churches with their towering spires that surrounded the Square had simply dwarfed what had been the city’s first attempts at serious architecture.  A movement to build a replacement for the Courthouse had gained momentum toward the end of 1850, with committees from the city and the county entertaining all ideas of what should be done to solve the space problems of both the county and the city, as well as what to do with the Public Square.  Eventually two alternatives emerged from the discussions.  Those who believed in frugality with public funds championed a plan to sell the Courthouse Square in order to secure the funds needed to build the necessary buildings on less expensive land.  Hence, only the cost of one ornate facade would have to be incurred to achieve a monumental image.  

Chicago’s frugal, profit-oriented citizens were overruled by a group of civic boosters, led by Francis Sherman, then the President of the Cook County Board, who sought to preserve the only public space in the center of the business district, upon which could be erected a truly monumental building, befitting the size of city Chicago was fast becoming (or more aptly phrased, the type of city the boosters had always hoped to make of Chicago).  This group favored a more traditional courthouse image: a freestanding, monumental courthouse set within a town’s square, detached from the street on all four sides.  By June 1851, Van Osdel had completed a design for each proposal, so that the necessary governmental committees could evaluate the qualities of each in arriving at a decision.  By this time, the city had formally agreed to join the county in erecting one building which would solve the space needs for both governments.  Committees from both bodies finally settled upon the more expensive, freestanding building, agreeing to fund its construction through a bond issue.  The county was to pay 75% of the project’s cost, while the city would fund the remaining 25%.

Van Osdel’s design of the new Courthouse Square had placed the new building in the exact center of the block that not only allowed the courthouse to be seen as a three-dimensional object (as opposed to only a two-dimensional wall surface), but also reserved the greater portion of the square’s perimeter as park space, a desperately needed commodity within the all-privately owned business district (with the exception of the lakefront and Dearborn Park).  From the description and dimensions given in Andreas, the floor plan can be deduced as follows:  the plan appears to have a Classical-inspired symmetry.  The Courthouse had a 164′ overall length in the east-west direction, and a 132′ length in the north-south or front-to-back dimension.  He established the overall massing of the building with a central 100’ square block from which projected on its East-West axis two wings, the East for the County, the West for the City.  Both major rooms in the east and west wings had dimensions of 60′ by 50,’ meaning that these wings projected 32′ beyond the central square.  The entrances on the north and south wings, however, extended only 16,’ exactly half the projection of the east and west wings, imparting to the north and south facades a distinct frontal quality, that was reinforced by the flight of monumental stone stairs to the second floor on the north and south faces.  The fronts of both entrances as well as the wings were capped by a shallow pediment, a detail that he had been forced to abandon in the cost-conscious design for the First Presbyterian Church, across the Square.  To denote the entries on the north and south facades, Van Osdel once again resorted to his favorite entry motif, the Roman triumphal arch, that he extended for two stories into the third floor.  The combination of the triumphal arch and the shallow pediment bore a resemblance to Alberti’s Renaissance masterpiece, Sant’ Andrea in Mantua. 

The building contained three floors.  In the ground floor (basement) was located the jail, the sheriff’s office, and rooms for the city watch-house and jailer.  The second and entry level (or piano nobile), was accessed by the stairs that led directly to a 14′ wide main hall on the second floor that ran the entire length of the building.  This floor contained the city’s offices in the north and west wings as well as an armory in the west wing.  Van Osdel symbolically elevated the Common Council room and the courtroom to the top floor of their respective wing.  (There is a sound structural reason for locating a large, column-free gathering space on the top floor of a multistoried building.  While the floor of such a space is heavily loaded with people and, therefore, requires closely spaced columns, the roof of the hall can be spanned with deep, longspan trusses that only have to carry the relatively light load of the roof.)  Both major rooms, therefore, would not only be situated “above business as usual,” but also could be formally expressed on the exterior by Roman-inspired domes (with a diameter of 20′) that roofed each space, a feature Van Osdel had already successfully employed in the Rush Medical School (see…). The rooms in the north and south wings had dimensions of 60′ by 32′ that left a 64′ square space in the center core with two stairways to the upper floor.  This space also acted as a spatial focus for the interior composition, and most likely was lit from the top by the eight Palladian windows that were located at the base of the building’s central cupola.

In the design of the Courthouse’s exterior, that not only had to exude a monumental image, but also confront the Protestant churches, some of Chicago’s best-designed buildings at the time, Van Osdel wanted to employ stone, but as the local quarries at Lemont and Athens were not yet capable at this time of producing such a quantity of dressed stone, he imported all the stone once again from Lockport, N.Y.  On September 12, 1851, a grand procession reported to have been a half a mile long formed in Dearborn Park to make the three and a half block long trek to the Public Square in celebration of the laying of the cornerstone of the new Courthouse. The actual ceremony of laying the cornerstone was performed by the Acting Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Illinois Freemasons, Professor J. V. Z. Blaney.  The festivities were concluded by an artillery volley. All things considered, an impressive celebration, indeed, to mark the start of construction of the city’s most important building.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago–I I. New York: Knopf.  1940.

Tallmadge, Thomas Eddy. Architecture in Old Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

While the new Tremont House opened on September 29, 1850, Van Osdel was already at work on another commission that the fire demon had created for him.  The return of prosperity in the mid-1840s had also brought with it an increased demand for leisurely diversions.  The depression had, for all practical purposes, wiped out Chicago’s first resident theater troupe that Alexander McKenzie had established in 1837, so that from 1840 the only thespian attempts in the city were those provided by itinerant companies. This situation was forever changed, however, in 1847 when John B. Rice, an actor and stage producer of some repute from Buffalo, decided to visit Chicago with a view towards ascertaining the potential of opening up a theater.  Coming from Buffalo, it is quite possible that Rice knew of the upcoming River and Harbor Convention in Chicago planned to open on July 5 and had set out to exploit its commercial potential.  He arrived during the spring of 1847 and convinced of the city’s economic future, bought a lot on the south side of Randolph Street, one or two lots east of Dearborn, to erect Chicago’s first permanent theater.  He hired builders Peter L. Updike and Azel Peck to design and build a 40′ by 80′ frame building to house the theater.  The theater was located on the second floor of the building and was decorated in a conservative style to lend an air of respectability to an institution that had a questionable reputation.  Rice reinforced this with the requirement that ladies would be admitted only if they had a male escort (to discourage prostitutes from plying their trade).  Rice’s Theater opened with a performance of “The Four Sisters” on June 28, 1847, exactly one week prior to the start of the convention.

On July 29, 1850, Rice had embarked on a new cultural experiment in his theater for Chicago: opera.  Using a home chorus and local orchestra, he had chosen Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” to introduce this art form to his uninitiated audience.  The town’s response to this foreign form of entertainment was lukewarm, leaving the theater far from filled to capacity on opening night.  On the second night of the scheduled two-night run, July 30, the meager attendance turned out to be a blessing, for midway through the opera, the chilling cry of “fire!” rang throughout the theater.  Rice, a consummate actor, immediately stepped onstage and quieted the crowd by reassuring his audience, “Sit down!  Sit down!  Do you think I would permit a fire to occur in my theater?  Sit down!”  Dutifully the audience responded with a sigh of relief, only to hear a voice from the prompter’s box countermand Rice’s performance with “Mr. Rice, the theater is on fire.”  A stable behind the theater had caught fire, that had quickly spread to the theater.  Although the audience was able to escape, the theater was a complete loss before firemen had finally gained control over the blaze.

Rice hired Van Osdel to design a larger theater for an adjacent site on the east side of Dearborn, just south of Randolph.  Chicago’s thespian endeavors, meanwhile, were moved to the temporary confines of “Tremont Hall,” a retrofitted dance hall in the then under-construction Tremont House.  Rice’s new theater was more than twice the size of Chicago’s first theater house, with dimensions of 80′ by 100′ that could seat 1400, that included three tiers of boxes.  To regain the confidence of his patrons, Rice had Van Osdel use as much brick as was feasible throughout the building.  Van Osdel even went so far as to incorporate a galvanized iron cornice in place of the conventional wood cornice (this entailed nothing more than a galvanized sheet metal covering over the wood cornice that was believed at the time to be able to protect the wood from fire) as a statement of the building’s fireproof intention.  In order to minimize the loss of business and interest of his audience, Rice had construction proceed at a record pace, so that the new building was completed by January, opening to its first audience on February 3, 1851.

Rice had enjoyed a monopoly on both popular and highbrow culture for over four years, until Levi J. North arrived in town with his circus on April 4, 1855.  North quickly perceived that Chicago had outgrown Rice’s ability to serve the expanding population and saw the potential for a large permanent home for his performers that could also present other attractions year-round.  He erected the National Amphitheater three blocks south of Rice’s theater, responding to the increasing price of land near the river and the corresponding spread of the residential area to the south.  Located on Monroe, between Wells and Clark, the wooden structure measured 90′ by 206′ which allowed it to seat over 3,000 spectators.  When the doors opened on August 4, 1855, patrons proceeded up eight-foot-wide stairways to the boxes in the gallery from which they had a view of the 42′ diameter performance ring, the entire hall being lit by 120 gas jets.  So successful was North’s initial investment in Chicago that he soon remodeled the Amphitheater so that it could also present legitimate theater and opera, in direct competition with Rice’s theater.  Meanwhile, the need for popular entertainment seemed to have been filled when Colonel Joseph H. Woods opened his “Museum” on Randolph Street on July 2, 1856.  Although among its “eight living wonders of the world” was the largest woman in the world (who reportedly weighed in at just under 900 pounds), unquestionably the favorite exhibit of museum goers was the ‘Zeuglodon,’ a ninety-six-foot-long fossil of a suspected monster from the past.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Cropsey, Eugene H., Crosby’s Opera House: Symbol of Chicago’s Cultural Awakening, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999.

Mack, Edwin F. Old Monroe Street: Notes on the Monroe Street of Early Chicago Days. Chicago: Central Trust Company, 1914.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– I. New York: Knopf.  1940.

Tallmadge, Thomas Eddy. Architecture in Old Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

Van Osdel’s loss of the commission for the Second Presbyterian Church may have been a blessing in disguise, for his practice was growing as Chicago’s economy regained its lost vigor.  In January 1848, he was hired by Common Council to design a combined municipal building and market hall, modeled in part after Boston’s Faneuil Hall.   When the city’s lease of the Saloon Building had expired in 1842 at the depth of the depression, the city administration had moved to less expensive quarters in Mrs. Nancy Chapman’s two-story building at the northeast corner of Randolph and La Salle. By 1848, the population of the city had increased to 20,023, an increase of 12,000 from its size only four years earlier.  (This translated into the fact that there were more newcomers in Chicago in 1848 than those who had been residents since 1844.)

It no longer seemed appropriate for the municipal government of such a large populace to still have to lease space for its everyday functions because it lacked its own permanent headquarters.  In addition, the city’s burgeoning population had also outgrown the meager Market House erected in 1840 at the corner of State and Lake.  Unfortunately, the city coffers were not deep enough to cover the cost of a traditional City Hall, so Chicago’s frugal leaders had Van Osdel combine a new, larger market hall with the program for the city’s space needs in order to help pay for the project.  City leaders also avoided the cost of procuring the land for the project by placing the building in the middle of State Street, that, coincidentally, had been recently widened by a third to 120’ from the river south to Randolph Street.  Hence, Van Osdel responded with a two-story brick and stone building that had a 40′ front on Randolph from which sprouted a clocktower and ran 180′ north to Benton Place.  The first floor contained thirty-two market stalls, while the municipal offices were located on the upper floor.  The upper floor was divided into four rooms: a 40′ by 20′ office for the city clerk occupied the south end, while an identical space at the north end was reserved for a library.  The 40′ by 140′ space in the middle was divided into two rooms (40′ by 68′ and 40′ by 72′) by folding doors that could be opened up for Common Council meetings, the first of which took place on November 13, 1848. During this period, the County also had decided that it needed to expand its courthouse on the northeast corner of the Public Square and so commissioned Van Osdel to design and build a new courthouse (no images appear to have survived) on the southeast corner of the Square, directly south of the original 1835 Courthouse.

9.4. THE TREMONT HOUSE

Faneuil Hall was not the first architectural influence that Boston had provided for Chicago, for even earlier the Tremont House had been so named after the famous Boston hotel.  Van Osdel became involved with its western namesake after the second Tremont House (that was erected in 1840 after the original had also been destroyed by fire) burned on July 21, 1849.  Its owners, Ira and James Couch, hired Van Osdel to design a replacement that would be the city’s grandest hotel, at the same location on the southeast corner of Dearborn and Lake Streets but on a much larger parcel of land.  Van Osdel, following the latest fashion in New York, produced a magnificent five and a half-story brick Italian Renaissance palace or palazzo that was so much larger than any other local hotel that it was often referred to “Couch’s folly,” for people could not understand the necessity for such a large hotel.  It was not only the tallest brick building in town, but also the first building in Chicago to incorporate imported stone trim (that was gray in color) that Van Osdel had shipped from a quarry in Lockport, N.Y.  Similar to his recent design for the First Presbyterian Church, he eliminated all traces of a roof, opting for a straightforward expression of the hotel’s walls, which were capped with a bracketed cornice.  

The design of the elevations foreshadowed the challenge to be faced in the near future in the composition of the elevation of a tall building, for instead of detailing each story of windows as a line of independent openings in the building’s wall, Van Osdel grouped the windows of the third and fourth floors together into an elongated unit with a recessed spandrel, thereby imparting a vertical accent to the facade that helped to balance the building’s long, horizontal elevation.  Hence, the upper four stories progressed upward in a subtle tripartite (three-part) rhythm of 1-2-1. This he placed atop a ground floor of stores that appear from its radical degree of openness to have been a cast iron storefront.  The main entrance on Dearborn was marked by a two-story high portico that consisted of a set of paired columns at each corner from which sprung Van Osdel’s favorite entrance motif, the triumphal arch.  This was placed in the center of the Dearborn facade, that Van Osdel had arranged into a composition of a center with corner pavilions by projecting the wall containing the last three windows at both ends ever so slightly as corner pavilions, that again helped to reinforce the vertical counterpoint of the long elevation.

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch, 1942.

Industrial Chicago-vol. 1: The Building Interests. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1891.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago–I I. New York: Knopf.  1940.

Randall, Frank A. History of the Development of Building Construction in Chicago (2^nd ed.). Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1999.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)