Bertrand Goldberg in Tower Town is a three-part set of articles detailing this Chicago-based architect’s one-time residence in the 1930s. This article looks at a beauty salon announced as having been designed by Goldberg. While opened, it may or may not have actually been completed by the architect. This beauty salon opened by 1938 at 840 North Michigan Avenue, on the same same block as Goldberg’s former “commune” residence detailed in part one of this series. Read More »

On the evening of July 30, 1939, Nancy Froemming “and her ambition” boarded a train in Milwaukee bound for Chicago. Miss Froemming — who thought that she “could sing with the best of them” — had decided that Milwaukee was too small of a town for her nascent singing career and set her sights on the hustle-and-bustle of Chicago. So off she went. There were only two problems with Miss Froemming’s plan: she was 13 years old, and the train she boarded was a freight line — the Bloomingdale Line. Upon alighting at Western Avenue, instead of booking a gig at the Cloister Inn or the Sunset Cafe, Miss Froemming was booked at Juvenile Hall.^0.1

Long before it was ever thought of as a trail, the Bloomingdale Line — as it was sometimes known — hauled freight (and, it seems, one young girl’s ambition) for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad Company, the storied “Milwaukee Road.” The Bloomingdale principally functioned as a connecting line used by freight trains between the north side of Chicago and the railroad’s yards at Galewood and Bensenville.^0.2 But perhaps more fundamentally, the branch was a link to the rest of the country; the trains that traversed the Bloomingdale could access the St. Paul’s sprawling, nationwide rail network.
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Bertrand Goldberg in Tower Town is a three-part set of articles, and Postwar Development of Michigan & Pearson is the second in a series of several Forgotten Chicago features highlighting this Chicago-based architect’s one-time residence in the 1930s, and lesser-known built and proposed projects in the Chicago area. This article looks at the demolition in the 1940s of Goldberg’s former 1930s “commune” for retail and housing and changes to the site since that time. Read More »

Bertrand Goldberg in Tower Town is a three-part set of articles, and the first in a series of several Forgotten Chicago features highlighting the Chicago-based architect’s one-time residence in the 1930s, and lesser-known built and proposed projects in the Chicago area. This article examines Goldberg’s former residence on the site of the former Senator Charles Farwell home Read More »

Chicago is, as one writer put it, a “city of travelers.”¹ The city’s sheer sprawl made that moniker inevitable. It also led to the creation of a transportation system that, at its apogee, consisted of a web of streetcars, diesel buses, electrified trolleybuses and elevated railways and subways. But not every mode of public transportation that once served Chicago is extant today. Read More »

When Thomas J. Harper, president of the West Town State Bank, opened for business on the morning of May 24th, 1930, he could not have known it would be the last such opening for some time. That day, after spending seventeen years in a two story building on West Madison Street Read More »

Born out of an elitist North Shore sensibility, the tumultuous transformation of the Edgewater Golf Club into the egalitarian Warren Park reveals much about the complicated process of real estate development in Chicago. Read More »

Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga characterizes Chicago as a snake that transforms itself every generation, shedding its old skin to emerge a new and different creature. Read More »

Looking at fiction films shot on location in Chicago as documents of a real place, three prevalent themes emerge. Read More »

In Chicago, a disused or demolished crossing of every type can be found. Here we are focusing on vehicular bridges over water where a connection no longer remains. Read More »