Whee – Me!

Not long ago, I wrote a post about how I couldn’t help but love my newly adopted Kentucky, the site – with West Virginia – of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy Feud.

The H-M Feud is definitive Kentucky lore, what with its backwoods, shootin’ iron totin’, cousin marryin’, moonshinin’ overtones. Now I’ve discovered a forgotten anecdote that is equally as definitive of my hometown, the great City o’ Chi-KAH-ga. Its existence has been hidden in the reams of information concerning the creation and destruction of the original McCormick Place, the nation’s largest exposition hall.

The Original McCormick Place

Back in the dead of winter 1967 McCormick Place burned down overnight before the opening of the international housewares show. The blaze is legendary in Chicago history because, for one thing, it was the biggest local conflagration other than the Great Fire of 1871 and, two, the structure had been touted as virtually fireproof.

Burnt Out and Collapsed

Sitting on the lakefront just south of Soldier Field and across from Meigs Field, McCormick Place was over 1000 feet long and more than 400 feet wide, as big as the Empire State Building laid on its side. Its exhibition space was larger than six football fields. After it was completed in 1960, McCormick Place helped make Chicago the convention center of the nation.

The city’s convention and exposition business came to a standstill after the fire and remained that way until McCormick Place was rebuilt. The new building opened in 1971, bigger, more modern, and – naturally – really fireproof this time.

McCormick Place: Part Deux

The history of the place serves as a primer for learning about the way Chicago does business. The publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Col. Robert R. McCormick, began pushing for the construction of the center nearly 40 years before it opened.

The Colonel: A Big Man In Town

McCormick insisted the place be built on its eventual site despite the city’s unwritten prohibition against lakefront construction (in 1909, architect and city planner Daniel Burnham issued his far-reaching Plan for Chicago, insisting that “The lakefront by right belongs to the people.”) The Colonel, though, would not be deterred. He cajoled, threatened, and bullied a string of Chicago mayors and Illinois governors until he died in 1955, the year Richard J. Daley was elected mayor.

Daley I: An Even Bigger Man

Daley was more interested in transforming his city into a big economic player than abiding by Burnham’s encomium that Chicago was a “Paris on the Prairie” with its green, unfettered front yard on the shores of Lake Michigan. Building a giant exhibition hall on the lakefront would mean thousands of jobs for union laborers loyal to Daley and a river of revenue in the form of visitor dollars spent on hotels, restaurants, taxicabs, and countless other amenities. After weighing his options – hundreds of millions of dollars of economic activity versus Burnham’s pristine lakefront – Daley said, in essence, the people’s right to the lakefront be damned.

Along with a massive expansion of O’Hare International Airport, the building of a University of Illinois campus just southwest of the Loop, and the announcement that the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company would erect the world’s second-tallest building on North Michigan Avenue, McCormick Place was part of Daley’s personal stamp on the city.

Then, within a span of seven hours beginning a few minutes after two in the morning, one of Daley’s signature shrines was transformed into nothing more than a gigantic smoking pile of twisted steel and crumbling concrete. Investigations into the fire later indicated there’d been glaring construction and safety oversights that contributed to the building’s destruction.

Wreckage

Daley ran for re-election later that year, eventually winning his fourth term in office. His Republican opponent, a harmless man named John Waner, hoped to use some of the findings of the investigations against Daley. He was rebuffed, though, when he approached the Tribune with his charges. The paper was eager to gain quick approval for the monument to its late publisher to be rebuilt on the lakefront so it told Waner to take a hike. At least that’s the story Waner told Mike Royko in the columnist’s book, “Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago.”

But here’s the little nugget I dug up tonight. It says everything you need to know about the city I was born in. Time magazine, in reporting on the McCormick Place fire, attempted to calculate the dollar cost to the city. After it listed the value of the building and all the display materials and goods, Time added that $25,000-worth of diamonds were missing. According to the magazine, the diamonds were to be given away as prizes during the housewares show.

Diamonds? What Diamonds?

How beautiful is that? How Chicago? Some 150 laborers and security guards were in McCormick Place when the fire started. Could one of them have grabbed the hot ice as he evacuated the place? Or could a firefighter have stuffed the box of rocks underneath his greatcoat amid all the confusion and smoke?

The diamonds have never been mentioned again. We only know this: some opportunistic Chicagoan became a wealthy man in the early morning hours of that frigid January day 41 years ago. It was a fitting coda for the first McCormick Place.

I love that city.

Big Mike