History in the Chicago Loop

Chris Meadows, a bartender at Cal's Liquors at 400 South Wells Street in the Loop Chicago, was smoking a cigarette outside at about 8:00 p.m. on the evening of Friday, September 14, 2012, when a veritable swarm of undercover agents told him to leave the scene.  At first he thought it was some sort of underaged drinking sting, but he later put two-and-two together and figured out that he and his patrons were supposed to be blown to smithereens by an aspiring young jihadi named Adel Daoud.  Seeking to kill as many Americans as possible, Adel settled on Cal's Liquors from among myriad potential Chicagoland targets because it was a liquor store, a bar, and a concert venue all in one, which is just the place to find infidels indulging their vices on a Friday night.  Cal's has been owned by the Feirstein family for nearly a half a century, and Mike Feirstein believes that their Jewish ethnicity may have played a role in its selection as the target.

Adel Daoud was arrested in an alley after he pressed a button on a remote-control device, expecting it to detonate a car bomb rigged inside a green Jeep Cherokee that he parked at the curb.

Photo credit: Vincent Desjardins

Nathan Leopold had been suffering from headaches, so he visited an optometrist named Emil Deutsch at 30 North Michigan Avenue, who prescribed a pair of reading glasses for him.  Leopold purchased the glasses, which had a patented hinge connecting the earpiece and the nosepiece.  The New York company that manufactured the hinge had only one Chicago distributor - Almer Coe & Co. Investigators linked the glasses found at the crime scene to Leopold because Almer Coe & Co.'s records indicated that it had sold only three pairs of the glasses with the patented hinge.  Coincidentally, another pair was purchased by Jerome Frank, who in 1953 denied the final pleas of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for a stay of their executions.

Richard Loeb was Leopold's partner in the murder of Bobby Franks.

State's Attorney Robert Crowe questioned Nathan Leopold at the Lasalle Hotel at the Northwest corner of Lasalle and Madison streets on May 29, 1924, about the pair of glasses that linked Leopold to the murder of Bobby Franks.  Leopold maintained that the glasses had fallen out of his suit pocket while he was on one of his "birding" expeditions.  In the hotel room, he tripped himself and fell over again and again, trying to demonstrate how the glasses could have fallen out of his pocket.  They never fell out.

Chicago was a bowling hotspot in the early 20th century.  The American Bowling Congress held its first ever national men's tournament in the Welsbach Building at 70 North Wabash Avenue in January 1901.  Forty-one teams from nine states bowled for turkeys during four days of competition.  Chicago was "one of the nation's leading bowling centers," according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.  That very same weekend, the Chicago Women's Bowling Association hosted the first-ever United States Women's Championships.  By 1910, the city had 230 bowling alleys.

Ogden Park at Ontario Street and Michigan Avenue was the venue for about half of the games played by the 1870 Chicago White Stockings, the predecessors of today’s Chicago Cubs.  The other half of the team’s games, typically against “national” teams, were played at the Dexter Park race track. The following season, the White Sox joined the National Association Of Professional Base-Ball Players and moved to the Union Base-Ball Grounds.

The Union Base-Ball Grounds, also known as White Stocking Park, was the venue for the home games played by the 1871 Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs).  The field was located on present-day Grant Park in the area bounded by Michigan Avenue on the west, Randolph Street on the north, and Washington Street on the south.  The ball park burned in the great Chicago Fire after the first season, and the team was homeless for the next two years.  In 1874, the White Stockings returned to the National Association and played their games at the 23rd Street Grounds.

Eleven people were killed and more than 180 injured when two Chicago CTA trains collided in the Loop neighborhood, causing the first four cars of the rear train to derail and fall to the street below just before 5:30 p.m. on February 4, 1977, in what was the worst accident in CTA history. On that day, the Evanston Express (now known as the purple line) was running counterclockwise on the tracks reserved for the Ravenswood train (now known as the brown line) and the westbound Lake-Dan Ryan trains (a combination of the red and green lines). A Ravenswood train stopped short of the State/Lake station and waited for the Evanston Express train to exit. A Lake-Dan Ryan train coming from behind the Ravenswood train did not stop and collided with it. The train operator, Stephan A. Martin, continued to apply power after the initial collision, forcing the front four cars of the Ravenswood train to buckle and derail. Three cars crashed to the street. The train operator tested positive for marijuana and had a poor safety record before the accident. As a result of the derailment, the CTA required its train operators to get permission from control center before proceeding past a red signal "on sight."

The single deadliest building fire in U.S. history claimed 602 lives at the Iroquois Theater at 24-28 West Randolph Street on December 30, 1903.  The fire, which was caused by an electrical shorting, prompted the reform and creation of a new set of fire codes and safety measures for theaters all over the country and even some cities in Europe.  From that time on, all doors in public buildings were mandated to open "outward," and the maximum number of seats between aisles was limited to six or eight.  Exits had to be clearly marked, and doors had to be rigged so they could be pushed open from the inside.  Only one person was convicted after the fire, a tavern keeper who was charged with robbing the dead.  Fire inspectors had allegedly been bribed with free tickets to overlook building code violations.  An estimated 575 people died the day of the fire, and the remainder died in the weeks that followed.  Mayor Carter Harrison, Jr. ordered the closing of all Chicago theaters for six weeks following the fire.

On June 5, 1946, a raging fire at the stately, luxurious, and upscale LaSalle Hotel, at the northeastern corner of LaSalle and Madison Streets, claimed the lives of 61 people, including numerous children and one of the firefighters.  The 23-story hotel was erected in 1909 and trumpeted as the most modern hotel in the country outside of New York City.  Emblematic of a new age in the hospitality industry, it offered guests bell-hop services, a barber shop, fine dining, evening entertainment, and a host of other services.  Its Blue Fountain Room was a favorite watering hole for the city's elite, and President William Howard Taft once turned the Presidential Suite on the third floor into a temporary White House annex during an extended stay in Chicago.

The fire started below ground in an elevator shaft at about 11:30 p.m. on June 4.  The lobby was quickly engulfed in flames, and the fire spread upwards from two interior staircases.  All 886 rooms were occupied at the time, and there was no sprinkler system.  Some of the victims jumped to certain death from higher floors in the building, including a woman who leaped with a child in her clutches. Most of those who perished died from asphyxiation after opening their doors to plumes of thick black smoke.  A first-aid station and makeshift morgue was set up at nearby City Hall.  The hotel had apparently been cited for a host of fire code violations about a month before the fire, none of which had been corrected.  In the wake of the tragedy, the City of Chicago implemented a host of new fire safety measures, including automatic alarm systems, the posting of evacuation instructions in all rooms, and the increased use of two-way radios.

The LaSalle Hotel was refurbished after the fire, but never recaptured its previous level of notoriety.  It was ultimately demolished in 1976 to make room for the massive commercial office building located there today.

Thirteen people were killed outright and 27 were injured when an airship caught fire and crashed through the glass roof of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank building at LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard on July 21, 1919, in what was the worst dirigible disaster in U.S. history up to that point.  The Wingfoot Air Express was transporting passengers from Grant Park to the White City amusement park on the South Side when the balloon ignited around 4:55 p.m. at an altitude of 1,200 feet after being airborn for several hours.  Some of the balloon's occupants jumped to safety with parachutes, including the pilot, Jack Boettner, and the chief mechanic, Harry Wacker.  Another mechanic, Henry Weaver, died when his parachute caught fire.  Passenger and publicity agent for the amusement park, Earl H. Davenport, died when the Wingfoot crashed.  Photographer E.H. Horton broke both legs after parachuting and later died at the hospital.  Ten bank employees were killed after the flaming debris crashed through the roof and fell to the floor of the main banking hall.  Thousands witnessed the disaster, and the crash was audible throughout downtown Chicago, according to a New York Times story.  None of the surviving crew members was able to offer a definitive cause for the fire.