In the gray morning the Chicago Fire Department continued to pour water
on the smoldering ruins of McCormick Place to extinguish hot spots.
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It
was gargantuan—a behemoth of a building—a long white box on the Lake Front. It was an economic powerhouse to rival the
belching steel mills of the South Works or the stinking, fading stockyards. It was the thirty year dream of the Chicago Tribune’s powerful Col. Robert R. McCormick and the pride and joy of Mayor Richard J.
Daley who finally pissed on Daniel Burnham’s plan and got it
built. McCormick Place was less than seven years old when in the frigid early morning hours of January 16, 1967
it was consumed in fire and left a
heap of smoldering wreckage and warped steel beams.
Janitors working overnight to prep the opening the next
day of the Housewares Show—then as
now the biggest trade show in the U.S.—smelled smoke at 2:05. The first Chicago Fire Department units on the scene discovered an already raging inferno. They also discovered that most of the exterior fire hydrants had been disconnected
during the construction of ramps for the new Stevenson Expressway and Lake Shore Drive and that the massive
building lacked a sprinkler system. Crews ran hoses over the ice to
open Lake Michigan for water. Valuable time was lost.
By
2:30 Robert Quinn, the colorful Fire Commissioner, best remembered for
setting off the city’s air raid sirens when
the White Sox clinched the American League Pennant back in 1959, arrived, he upgraded it to a five-alarm fire. Eighteen minutes
later, he ordered the first special
alarm. Before it was done, over 65%
of the city’s fire equipment was
engaged. Routine cold weather fires elsewhere in the city consumed buildings that otherwise
might have been saved.
The
mammoth effort did no good. The roof of the massive main convention hall collapsed. The fire was declared finally struck at 9:30. Only a damaged
Arie Crown Theater remained
standing. One man, security guard Kenneth
Goodman died in the fire and several firefighters had relatively minor injuries, mostly due to slipping on ice from all of the water
poured on the fire.
The
thousands in town for the Housewares show were at a loss—all of their exhibits were ruined. Some smaller start ups lost their prototypes and never recovered. Most exhibiters
left town. A handful tied to have some
sort of show with brochures and what
they had in their luggage at the Palmer House.
Predictably
the two biggest backers of the exhibition hall tried to rally support for an immediate attempt to rebuild. Mayor Daley told reporters, “This is a tragic loss to
the people of Chicago. But remember the Chicago fire of 1871. The people
recovered from that one.” And the Tribune echoed the sentiment and
comparison in a front page editorial.
Way
back when Chicago was indeed the Toddlin’
Town of the Jazz Age and the rail hub of America, the city had
already become the convention center of
the nation, supplanting previous claimants like Baltimore and Philadelphia. Led by a series of national political conventions by both parties, word had gotten out that not only was the city capable of handling big events,
but that as a wide open town its gin mills, nightclubs, burlesque houses,
and armies of hotel lobby hookers attendees
could have a mighty good time far
away from home.
In
the mid-‘20’s the main venue was the Coliseum
on the near South Side,
comfortably close to the notorious Levee
District, a cavernous former Confederate
Prison with a castle-like façade
which had been converted from a Civil
War museum. The Armory
and other smaller halls took up
the slack. But in the Roaring Twenties when people seemed to
have money to burn, the biggest conventions along with trade events like the Auto Show were already outgrowing these
venues.
Always
a big dreamer, in 1927 Col. McCormick first proposed building a huge new
hall. He relentlessly used the pages of
the Tribune
to promote the idea. And with
his considerable clout in the city, no one doubted he could do it.
Chicago Tribune owner Col. Robert R. McCormick campaigned to build a Lake Front convention center for 30 years.
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And
he probably could have—if he was flexible on where it would be built. But he was not. He wanted it built on the Lake Front at 23rd Street, a couple of miles east of the McCormick Reaper Works, the foundation
of his family fortune. His family also controlled real estate nearby that could boom with a new convention center. But he met the considerable opposition of
many other members of the Chicago elite—or
at least their formidable civic minded
wives who refused to abandon the famous Burnham Plan which called for the entire Lake Front to be kept clear of development and preserved as open parkland for the citizens.
Then,
one after another, other obstacles arose—the Crash of ’29 and the Great
Depression took the economic wind
out of the city, dried up the convention business and the money for private
investment in the scheme. Then the
election of Anton Cermak as Mayor
marked the end of Republican dominance
of city government—and with it much of McCormick’s political clout. Later it is conceivable that a project of
that size and scope might have become a public
works project with New Deal funding—but
the McCormick’s virulent attacks on Franklin
Roosevelt and the Democrats cut
off that possibility. Then, of course,
came World War II.
But
McCormick never gave up his crusade even as new venues were built including the
Chicago Stadium on West Madison in 1929 and the International Amphitheatre by the Stock
Yards in 1934. In 1950 Navy Pier was opened to trade shows,
sharing space with both the active dock
and the University of Illinois at
Chicago.
The
1950’s were another boom time reminiscent of the ‘20’s. Trade shows, especially, were outgrowing
available facilities and there were grumblings that some might now move as air travel was supplanting rail and
making destinations like Los Angeles and
San Francisco more attractive. The Col. stepped up his campaign, but died in 1955, his dream unrealized.
The
Col.’s death, however, was an opportunity for Richard J. Daley, just coming
into his own as a building mayor
with big plans. He made peace
with the Tribune which agreed to support his proposal for the long
dreamed of Lake Front facility as a monument to the Col.’s memory. They also agreed to wink at the public funding, which McCormick had
always rejected. There may also have
been a tacit agreement to lay-off the Democratic administration. Certainly
there after that the Tribune was much
friendlier to the Mayor and allowed the struggling Chicago Republican organization to wither away without support.
Ground
was broken in 1958. Two years later McCormick Place was completed. The total
cost was $41 million. That figure did
not include tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure
support for the building including roadways,
ramps, and utilities. In tried and true
Chicago fashion contracts were let
to friends and cronies and there was plenty of cash to be skimmed, and
the pockets of officials fattened. From
the beginning McCormick Place was a cash
cow for many in so many ways.
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Despite
being decried as an architectural monstrosity—it resembled
an over-size concrete warehouse in
an industrial district—the building
was a success. It opened with an intimate dinner for 500 movers
and shakers presided over by a beaming Mayor Daley on November 18,
1960. The next day the first exposition,
World Flower and Garden Show,
opened.
During
its first year, the facility had 4.5 million visitors and exhibitors and hosted
28 major exhibitions.
McCormick
Place had an interior exhibition space
1005 long and 300 feet wide which could comfortably fit six football fields. The cafeteria
could serve 1,800 people in an hour. The Arie Crown Theater had 5,081 seats and
a mammoth stage that could
accommodate any production. Despite notoriously bad acoustics the Theater soon became home to touring Broadway shows and the biggest concerts in the city in the
days before outdoor arena shows.
Use
grew year by year. And so did the money
being pumped into the local economy. An
estimated 10,000 people were estimated to be employed directly by McCormick Place and its contractors and by
vendors. Thousands of others in the hospitality industry owed their jobs to
the place.
With
all of this in jeopardy, Mayor Daley
wasted no time in rebuilding. A new financing scheme was already in the pipeline for planned expansion and renovation of the facility. On
the day after the fire Democratic Governor
Otto Kerner hastily signed the
financing deal that guaranteed
enough money for the convention hall to be replaced.
The
new building would rise in the footprint
of the old and incorporate the still standing Arie Crown. But it would be engineered to new fire
standards and instead of an ugly box would stand a sleek glass and steel building. On January
3, 1971, the replacement building, later called the East Building and now called the Lakeside Center, opened with a 300,000 square feet main exhibition
hall.
The vast, sprawling McComick Place complex seen here in 2012 occupies both sidse of
Lake Shore Drive connected by a pedestrian walkway spanning the road.
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Since
then additions have been made. The North
Building, across Lake Shore Drive
was completed in 1986, is connected to the East Building by an enclosed pedestrian bridge. The South Building, dedicated in 1997,
contains more than 1,000,000 square feet of exhibition space. It more than
doubled the space in the complex and made McCormick Place the largest convention
center in the nation. In August 2, 2007 the West Building with 470,000 square feet was added bringing McCormick
Place’s total existing exhibition space to 2,670,000 square feet.
In
2017 the Wind Trust Arena, a 10,387 seat
arena on Cermak Road just north of the West Building, opened. It is currently
home to DePaul University men’s and women’s basketball and the Chicago Sky of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA.) It has also hosted rock concerts and special
events like the Star Wars Celebration previews of new films and programs in the
franchise—Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian—were unveiled
with epic ballyhoo in 2019. The same year it was the site for the inauguration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
McCormick Place at night.
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Despite
the expansion, there have been controversies
and challenges for McCormick
Place. Trade shows long complained about labor
costs in Chicago where contracts
with numerous crafts led to classic featherbedding from the number of laborers needed to unload
trucks to riggers being required to unfold tables and electricians
to plug in an extension cord—or allegedly even to turn on a switch. Big
exhibitions, led by the Housewares Show began to threaten to leave the city unless reforms were
made. Despite initial foot dragging by the City and a long rear-guard action by the craft locals,
eventually pressure from the Illinois
General Assembly which threatened
fund and bond authority for the
Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, pushed the unions into significant
concessions. Now exhibitors can put up their
own displays or hire contractors to do it without using the facility’s union
personnel with some restrictions.
Some major expositions—most notably the Consumer
Electronics Show abandoned the city
anyway for the warmth and glitz of Las Vegas where hotel rooms are cheap and sin is still peddled. Chicago has become a sanitized city, squeaky clean, with
most of the old open
vice gone or driven underground, and
with it one of the lures of city.
Smaller shows and conventions now often locate at facilities near O’Hare.
Entrance to the Chicago Auto Show in 2019.
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Still, McCormick Place is busy and its various halls host hundreds of
events every year. It remains an
economic powerhouse. It will hold Sox Fest this
weekend and the Chicago Auto Show, the largest in
the nation, which opens for its 118th edition for a two week run on February.
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