Its pretty cool, was even featured on a local TV show yesterday...Chicagos oldest building (only by a few years, there are other contenders here on the south side that seem to date from the 1830's as well) has been moved twice..in the 1960's the clarke House was a church on about 43rd street and to move it to its present location (not far from where it first stood) required lifting it up and over
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Osage Orange was one of several bushes used as a fence substitute in pre civil War times. They are prevelent still in Indiana, I haven't seen any in Illinois though...
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"The Calumet Route" was considered a more practical route than the "Chicago Route" when Bucklin the engineer was surveying southern Cook County in 1830, but GUrdon Saltonstall Hubbard (the original GSH Bears fans!) said don't put the terminus too close to Indiana...so chicago it was.
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Pre civil War Chicagoland is disapearing every year. Old barns, farm houses, pioneer roads, even family names are going fast. What these farmers planted sometimes lasts longer than what they built...case in point. I've been searching for decades to find info on the Periam Orchard, Cook County's first (128th and Michigan Avenue 1838-1860) and found a reference to the name Periam in a farmers period
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When the I&M Canal opened in 1848 it was too shallow at times during the year, by spring 1849 the Calumet Feeder canal remedied that, diverting water from the Calumet River ABOVE Blue Island westward through the valley of the Cal Sag to the Canal. There are remnants of this often forgotten part of the I&M Canal corridor. Alwurn Bridge (now closed) runs along the remains of the old dam (whi
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I'm starting to interview Mr. Roberts.
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I've heard that the first cub Scout troop in America was on the south side in the West Pullman neighborhood.
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The story I got when I worked at CHS was that the Waubansee stone was found on the grounds of fort Dearborn when the Army came to build at chicago in the summer of 1803 and it came to CHS as part of the Gunther Collection. At some point it suffered the ignominy of being fitted with a waterfountain for museum visitors...sigh. It very likely dates from before Ft. D but how old who knows...the top of
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The Alfred Scharf manuscript collection at Chicago History Museum is the best when you're looking for the geography of our pre industrial chicago. It was Scharfs labelled arrowhead collection that was transferred to the Field museum.He also interviewed sons and daughters of the original pioneers during the 1890's.
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After the local native American tribes were "treatied" out of their traditional lands they were escorted out of the chicagoland area starting in 1835, again in 1838 and pretty much gone shortly after that. In came the surveyors (1822 and 1835)then the US Land Office opened on Lake Street near State in the spring of 1835 and all the remants of The Pottawatomie, Ottowa and Ojibwa camps tha
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These aren't my schools, but the descriptions of the rooms and the desks (we had 48 per room)and those big lon POLES we used to open and shut the windows sure do sound familiar. I (like my mother before me) went to Brenan School on 115th & Eggleston in the Roseland neighborhood. We had a "big" and "little" Kindergarten. I now realize that us baby boomers in our peak years (
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Geologically it may be that Goose Island at one time WAS an island in the North Branch possibly formed by a particularly violet spring freshet (thaw) caused the Des Plaines to rage UP the south branch and poceed up the North creating a separate path in the river bed of the North Branch...when the city of Chicago began dredging the harbor and the chicago River it likely widened a low marshy area th
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Let's not forget how wonderful it used to be to set down at the huge wooden counter at the old Van Buren station (ca. 1960) and order some food whuile waiting for your train. After all Van Buren WAS the official downtown commuter station for all those years, until the Prudential Building (1955) changed all that...
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Does pre fab mean before the Beatles ha ha I guess so. The pre fabs would've housed people that might've gone to all the bars and nightclubs around the University that were torn down in 1957/58 as part of "Urban Removal" ...photographs of the activities going on in the Midway west of the World's Fair proper are pretty strange...Thomas Pychon's novel "Against The Day" explores
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Yes I know about the IC Historical Society and the Hyde Park Historical society...
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The IC really started cutting back on commuter service service north of Hyde Park after the Race Riots of 1919, any data on when 35th st went down fer instance? Also there's a couple vanity stops, one at 18th (for George Pullman's personal car) and @ 126th St called Wildwood (for George's business partner col. James H Bowen) and even one at 123rd for a huge beer garden called Gardner's Park that f
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After the Race Riots of 1919 it seems like the ICRR began to decrease service to "Bronzeville" 31st, 35th etc but also there used to be stops at 123rd Street (a huge beer garden that served THOUSANDS called "Gardner's Park (from 1880-1900), a private "flag stop" at 18th St (for George Pullman)and a similar "vanity stop" for George's business partner Col. James H.
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Did the Happy Medium, London House and Mr. Kelly's have an "open door" policy? Did they admit black patrons? I know the famous downtown jazz spot The Blue Note did. I heard the Chez Paree would admit anyone but that they had a "no mixed tables" policy, so if you were a "zebra couple" you couldn't sit together! Its a part of jazz history that doesn't get much ink. Here
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Yes GARZ you're probably right. From my Roseland/Gano/ Fenger High perspective everything west of Halsted gets kinda lumped together. Aircraft factory? Very interesting. I also read that there was a suerkraut factory along Halsted in the area back around 1900. The "Halsted St corridor" is an area that is a "dead zone" when it comes to history...too far east to get the attention
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The 144th and Halsted address is correct for the radio controlled planes... Halsted was pretty built up from 95th south to the Calumet River (130th) beyond that was forest Presserves, a golf course and the industries around the Riverdale rail yard. Also Halsted drive Inn theater @ 137th. The Dan Ryan only went as far as 99th and Halsted for a couple years until they cleared the way to build I-57 (
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Leo Lightner, my choir instructor at Elim Lutheran church lived in an "improved" one of these prefabs in the early '60's thathe converted to a Japamese garden type structure with rice paper walls indoors, very trippy, burnt down eventually. Chicago Midway Labs, a Govt "satallite instrumentation" facility my Dad worked in from Sputnick till John Glen was at 61st and Dorchester..
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Again here on the far south side (Helloooo!)we had a lot of little "Cook County Common Schools" before being absorbed by the City of Chicago in 1890...one (built 1858)is still standing as a house at 122nd near Michigan and another (built 1882)has been moved off its original site near Kensington and Michigan to serve as a church on 116th and State. Grammar scholl attendance was not mandit
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Out here on the far south side we had our share of "proposals". One was extending the "L" from 63rd St south on Wentworth Avenue to the Illinois Central Blue Island Branch at 121st. They also recently proposed extending the Red Line from 95th and the Dan Ryan SW to the C&^EI/GTX tracks so as to build a new commuter line through Roseland (with a station at Kensington) out to
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That's the area where the first clay pigeon shoots were started in the 1800's. There were so many ducks congregating on Lake calumet that in the 1870's chicago "sportsmen" would come down to the Kensington Station on weekends on the ICRR and spend a day shooting and drinking. Monday came and the shores of Lake Calumet would be lined with 3 foot deep piles of dead ducks, rotting in the su
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Lake Calumet. Holland kids from South Holland used to be able to SKATE TO THE LOOP down the frozen calumet River then over on the Rock Island railroad ditch at Blue Island...round trip in only a day when a buggy ride might take 10 hours one way...of course that was in the 1860's!
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Let's keep digging!
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Wow some things are just too weird to be real...do you think that causeway woulda been the cause of fatal accidents during a healthy January noreasteroff of Lake Michigan? Waves shaking the structure, ice covered road, wind pushing vehicles into the frozen water...sounds like something out of Astounding Magazine! Only slightly less practical than a port at Lake Calumet!
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How about Fat Belly's on Chestnut and State "Beer, Burgers and Banjos"!?
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Any Hyde Parkers (or Uf of C grads) remember the scene at the Fret Shop before it moved to Harper Court or Toad Hall were you could catch Jim Kweskin w'o his Jug Band? The man tore down a lotta jazz joints but the collegiate folk/whatever joints kept popping up!
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Don't forget Ch 11 had "Sid McCoy and Friemds" July 1952 9:30 every Tuesday (found an ad in the Hyde Park Herald!) jazz and blues!
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