Eleanor Clubs

 

Breckinridge Hall (originally Eleanor Club One) 1916 

 

Or why naming things is important. I decided early on to create a tour for myself of the Midway. I was going to find out the history of the buildings and their names and find out what had been where during the Columbian Exposition. I looked up Sophonisba Breckinridge way back when because her name was on a dorm—and it was in researching her that I found out about the Eleanor Clubs.

This building, now empty and neglected and I assume threatened, was built as Eleanor Club One. It’s mistakenly identified in some places as the first. Rather it was the flagship club because it was custom built after much experimentation with existing buildings.

The Eleanor Clubs were the brainstorm of Ina Law Robertson, who arrived at the University of Chicago Divinity School from Oregon in 1895. She quickly realized the problem of being alone in a big chaotic city and finding housing that was both safe and pleasant. Young women alone in the city were also seen as a social problem—think Sister Carrie by Dreiser. When she inherited some money with the stipulation that she do good with it, she set about creating the kind of housing she wished she’d had.

She saw the Eleanor Clubs as transitional housing for single women arriving in the big city, especially from rural towns. Unlike organizations like the YWCA, the clubs were self-organized. Rules were created by the residents themselves. No religious services were required. Room and board were set at the lowest level to keep the clubs self-sustaining. They provided private single rooms and large pleasant public areas, with two hot cooked meals a day and a cleaning service. It meant that women could launch whatever plans they had—professional, educational, artistic—and not worry about their safety, their rent, or time-consuming household chores. And on top of that, women newly arrived could encounter kindred spirits to start up a social network as they got their bearings in the big city. After two years, they were expected to move out to their own accommodations.

This building, Eleanor Club One, was put on the Midway, next to the Del Prado Hotel, because it gave women access to the University, the parks, and the lake—with easy train access to downtown. It originally had a roof garden to catch the cooling lake breezes.The entrance is set back to indicate that it was private (not a hotel). Everyone had to pass a reception desk. Men were not allowed past the public areas on the ground floor. There was a choral room for classes and dances.

The Eleanor project expanded for a while into many projects but gradually contracted until it closed down in 2002. Even in the 1970s, women valued the clubs as places where they met women with all kinds of interests from all over the world.

This building was sold to the university in 1968, which used it as a dorm. It’s part of the planned development, which means the university can do whatever it wants without public feedback, so I’m assuming, given the neglect, that its days are numbered.

https://news.wttw.com/.../room-grow-chicago-s-eleanor-clubs

Lawrence, Jeanne Catherine. "Chicago's Eleanor Clubs: Housing Working Women in the Early Twentieth Century." Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8 (2000): 219-47. Accessed March 4, 2021. doi:10.2307/3514415.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3514415

Riding in the Parks

 

Galloping on the Midway 1955 (apf2-09063 in the Uchicago digital collections).

Around 2003, I noticed that there was a sign on Woodlawn just north of 60th that said Horse Crossing. That seemed odd until I realized that the cinder jogging path running the length of the Midway from Washington Park toward Jackson Park must have originally been a riding path. Around the same time, there was a prolonged dry spell and the outline of the original cinder riding paths in Jackson Park showed up as different colors in the parched grass. There were once almost 8 miles of riding trails in the South Park system. There was a long tradition of riding in the park. Daniel Burnham had designed the round house south of the DuSable Museum as a stable in 1880. In the 1920s, the university fielded a polo team that practiced on the Midway and the women’s athletics department offered an Equestrian class.

A 1985 article in the Tribune noted that as late as 1966, the Hyde Park Riding Stables at 742 East 61st Street served 200 riders every weekend. The owner, Mrs. O. D. Baldwin, declared that she wasn’t going to leave the city: “People are entitled to Park bridle paths.” But stables are smelly and real estate rose in value so NIMBYism and urban renewal eliminated the last public stables in the city. The university’s landscaping blocks the Midway trail now from Ellis to Woodlawn. The remnants of the trails get rare use whenever the Chicago Police horses, housed at the South Shore Cultural Center, practice or the Broken Arrow Riding Club trucks their horses in for a ride.

Gold Star Memorials

During World War II, many Chicagoans set up small personal memorials to lost loved ones. Almost all have vanished, but two survive in Hyde Park. 

With 16 million Americans in the Armed Forces, service was a communal affair. Everyone knew someone who was serving. During the war, people put blue paper stars in their windows to show that a member of the family was serving. When a member of the family died in combat, the families replaced it with a gold star. Many people wanted a more permanent way to honor the one they’d lost. Some people switched from a paper gold star to a metallic star attached to their building. One such was on a building at 55th and Dorchester. These gold stars in Hyde Park were lost to urban renewal.
 

Those with access to a parkway could set up a flagpole at the point of a concrete V for Victory. They’d place a plaque with the name on the flagpole. There once were many of these flagpoles throughout the city, but over the decades, the poles came down, the names were lost, and the meaning of the concrete V disappeared. The remnants of one still exist on the northeast corner of 56th and Blackstone.
 

Hyde Park’s V barely survived road crews in 2004. They smashed it up doing sidewalk work. Just as they were about to toss the concrete into the dumpster, a neighbor stepped up to save it. No one was sure exactly what it was, but the memory that it had something to do with V for Victory survived. Some claimed it was a tiny Victory Garden, though Victory Gardens were large plots of vegetables that fed whole families. Finally, a Hyde Parker who remembered the war, Damaris Day, wrote to the Hyde Park Historical Society to set the record straight. It was built by the janitor of the building at 5557 S. Blackstone in memory of his son. The janitor raised the American flag there every day and grew flowers inside the V to keep his son’s name alive.
 

The other personal memorial that survives is an aging concrete post on the northwest corner of 55th and South Shore Drive. I’ve been told that there once were a number of these concrete posts scattered around the street corners of Hyde Park. A few still survive elsewhere in the city, including two along Fullerton and one in Hegewisch. Some are cryptic concrete posts without a plaque. Hyde Park’s memorial pole survives because it is on a corner undisturbed by urban renewal in a parkway that’s well maintained. It even has its Gold Star plaque, dedicated to "Arthur W. Klein, Lt. USN, 1905-1944." 

Arthur’s parents were Jewish immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father, Jacob, opened a pawn shop in the Loop in 1885. Over the years, it grew into a successful sporting goods business. Arthur’s sister married Alderman Abe Cohen. Milton, Arthur’s younger brother, married, moved in down the street of his parents at 51st and Drexel, and went into the family business. Arthur became a lawyer with his own firm—Klein and Harrow—at 10 N. LaSalle. He was living with his parents in October 1940 when the order came for all men over the age of 18 to register for the draft. Arthur enlisted in the Navy right away. With his education and past ROTC experience in high school, he became an officer. He took courses in radio, electronics, and microwaves at the University of Chicago.
 

While he was away, Arthur’s mother died. Left on his own, Arthur’s father moved into the Shoreland Hotel on South Shore Drive, awaiting Arthur’s return. But Arthur didn’t return. He died in Washington, D.C., after four years in the Navy. Arthur’s memorial service was held at the Furth Funeral Home at 936 East 47th Street, where his mother’s service had been. Lee J. Furth was proud to donate memorial services to gold star families. Grief-stricken, Jacob arranged to set up the post in Arthur’s memory. It probably helped to have an alderman in the family to round up the rationed concrete and metal. It was near the Shoreland Hotel where Jacob could walk by his son’s name every day.
 

Grief and remembrance can take odd turns. While tracking down information about Arthur Klein, I discovered that his brother, Milton, has his own footnote to history. After the war, he built up Klein’s Sporting Goods into a large mail order business that, among other sporting goods, included guns. Milton worried about the unregulated sales, but guns had been part of the business since the pawn shop days. In 1963, an order from “A. Hidell” in Dallas came for a used Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. It was Lee Harvey Oswald, who used the rifle to assassinate President Kennedy. Milton’s life lurched into the public gaze to his horror. The grief Milton felt led him to lobby Congress successfully to ban interstate gun sales in 1968, at the cost of his business.
 

This story appeared in the Hyde Park Herald, November 11, 2021.

William J. Warfield

 

Officers of the Famous African-American Regiment. Left to right: Maj. J.R. White; Lt. Col. Otis B. Duncan, highest ranking African-American officer in the U.S. Army; Lt. W.J. Warfield (National Archives 165-ww-127a-009a)

When I was researching Hyde Park/Kenwood/Woodlawn’s first women representatives, I came across the name of William J. Warfield, who was elected in 1928 in the same district. Warfield was the 15th African-American to serve in the Illinois House. The first African-American in the Illinois legislature was John W. E. Thomas in 1876. Though he wasn’t among the first, his election was striking enough that W.E.B. DuBois wrote a letter to him, asking for a photograph and a brief biography for the Crisis.

I discovered something else about him. He was a highly decorated veteran of World War I. He was in the 8th Regiment of the Illinois National Guard when it got called to active duty on the Mexican Border in 1916, after Pancho Villa and others started raiding across the border during the Mexican Revolution. The chaos that ensued showed how very unready the U.S. was to enter the world war raging in Europe.

He got called up again in 1918 in World War I, when the National Guard regiment was assigned to the 93rd Division. When they got to Europe, the African-American Division was assigned to the command of the French, mostly because the Army didn’t want to deal with the issues of segregation. The 93rd fought under Marshall Foch at the Meuse-Argonne Offensive and the Oise-Aisne Offensive. Over 500 soldiers in the 93rd receive the French Croix de Guerre for gallantry in the face of the enemy, 520 were killed, and 2,600 were wounded. The U.S. Army ignored the 93rd because officially it had zero days in battle because it hadn’t fought with the U.S. Army. Under pressure, the U.S. Government acknowledged in 1919 that the unit had seen combat and awarded 75 Distinguished Service Crosses.

In a list of awards, it described the one for William J. Warfield. He was a First Lieutenant near Ferme-de-la-Riviere. He and his platoon were cut off from their company, but he led a “stubborn resistance against enemy machine-gun nests,” capturing the gun and killing the crew, even though he had been severely wounded. He refused medical relief until the machine gun was silenced.

Here's what I could find about his civilian experience. As a representative in the Assembly, he was a Republican. He made his money in real estate, serving as a tax attorney with the assessor’s office for a time. He lived at 704 or 706 East 50th Place (both addresses were listed).

All the time, his distinguished military service continued. By 1940, he was a Brigadier General in the National Guard, the second African-American to hold that rank in the history of the United States. But with the war and active duty for the Guard, he was forced to retire due to illness. At some point, soon after, he entered the VA nursing home north of the city. There’s a letter from Eisenhower to him for sale on the internet. Eisenhower was in Chicago and tried to phone him. The nurse told him that Warfield was unable to speak, so Eisenhower dashed off a note on stationery from the Blackstone Hotel, wishing him well and pointing out that he, Eisenhower, had also served on the Mexican border in 1916 and they were fellow soldiers.

Photo from the Illinois National Guard list of past officers.

https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2017/02/13/a-brief-look-at-african-american-soldiers-in-the-great-war/

Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to William J. Warfield, September 17, 1929. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries

https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/15287

Balli-Hi Lounge

I've been trying to identify the unidentified images in the Mildred Mead collection in the Chicago History Museum. If there's a business sign, I can usually make some headway. 

The Balli-Hi Lounge next to the bowling alley (punning on the musical South Pacific) was at 5122 S. Lake Park. 

 

I investigate by first looking in the newspapers because they are more searchable and then looking at white pages and yellow pages. The lounge fielded a bowling league team made up of Japanese-American residents of Hyde Park. They played in a league that was sports news in the Daily Calumet during 1955-1957.

Chicago History Museum, ICHi-087539; Mildred Mead, photographer 1955

 

It was next to a row of stores that included a Records store and included the Hyde Park Hotel.  

I posted these photos on a group on Facebook and many people recalled the bowling alley. 

• Larry Mauksch "Where I rolled my first bowling ball circa 1957"
• Glenn Eisen "We had a synagogue youth group bowling team there in 1954 and my stepfather was part of a B'Nai Brith league there through the 1950's"
• Larry Schwartz "My father was in a league there and I remember going with him in the 1950s."
• William Boardman "It had multiple floors with elevators. I made a nice conference table out of wood from the lanes."
• Penny Martin Klyber "Many birthday parties" 

In addition, many recalled the once large community of Japanese-Americans in Hyde Park, who had been released into Chicago from the internment camps on the West Coast.

David Wallach and His Fountain

 

The David Wallach Fountain (taken 2018)

I love walking through the 55th Street tunnel to the Point and seeing the David Wallach Fountain. But who was David Wallach? Is he a good person to be guarding the park? 

I went on the search and found out that David Wallach was born in Prussia in 1832, immigrated to the United States at 18, and moved to Rockford to run a store with his brother. By the 1860s, Rockford apparently seemed a bit small and slow. He moved on to the ever-expanding Chicago nearby. He had done well enough for himself that he became a partner with Cahn, Wampole & Co., wholesale clothing manufacturers based in Chicago. He accumulated a small fortune. 

Sketch of David Wallach (Chicago Chronicle, November 5, 1895)

After his retirement from the firm in 1891, he was apparently a bit bored and started up a photographic supply business. That apparently is why the Park District identifies that as his call to fame, but he died just two years after starting Sweet, Wallach, & Co. and it doesn't seem to have survived his death. The only trace I found was an 1892 catalog in the National Museum of American History archives. 

At his death in 1894, the Cook County Death Index called him a “capitalist.” He called himself a “wholesale clothing merchant,” but I’d label him “philanthropist.” After his death, the Chicago Chronicle said that, despite Wallach’s wish for quiet giving, the board of every charity in the city knew him and knew that, if they reached out, it was never in vain. It's not surprising. He was a member of Chicago Sinai Congregation, whose influential rabbi, Emil G. Hirsch, inspired his congregation to address the social ills of the day. Hirsch was a professor at the University of Chicago. Another member of the congregation was Julius Rosenwald. 

Wallach’s will made some of his philanthropy visible. Among the bequests were ones to Michael Reese Hospital, the Institute for Crippled and Destitute Children, and homes for the elderly. The biggest gift, about 10% of his estate, went to the Chicago Orphan Asylum. The need was great because smallpox and cholera epidemics orphaned children throughout the 19th century. He didn’t just give cash. He also gave his time, bringing the children treats because he wanted them to have some joy. 

After Wallach’s death, his close friend, Dr. Edmund J. Doering, wanted the children to remember “their staunchest supporter” so he endowed an annual “David Wallach Day” with puppet shows, magicians, ice cream, and cake for the 200 children. But the annual day faded away in a few years, which often happens to memorials that rely on institutional memory.

There was one donation in Wallach’s will that the Tribune made a fuss over. Upon his wife’s death, $5,000 ($159,000 in 2021 dollars) would finance a fountain for “men and beasts” at a location south of 22nd Street, north of 33rd Street, and east of Michigan Avenue. Wallach had lived at 3332 S. Vernon. It was his gift to the working horses in his neighborhood and one he was willing to put his name on. 

But no fountain appeared. 

In 1914, his sister in New York wrote the mayor of Chicago asking why there wasn’t a fountain. The city scrambled to unearth the will. Alderman George F. Harding, Jr. (yes, the Harding who collected medieval armor) was delighted. Harding had gone to school with Wallach’s son, and he thought the intersection at 35th Street, Vincennes, and Cottage Grove in his ward would be perfect for a dramatic fountain. 

And yet, no fountain appeared. 

In 1937, Wallach’s heirs asked again. Lawsuits ensued. Once the dust settled, the heirs and the Park District formed a committee to find a location and a design. Wallach’s heirs were living in Hyde Park, in the Parkshore on 55th Street near South Shore Drive. They had watched Alfred Caldwell landscaping Promontory Point next door and thought the new park would be an ideal setting. The American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars didn’t agree. They sued to move it to 47th Street. The judge tossed the case, saying the will specified 55th Street, which, of course, it hadn’t. Whatever their plans were, by the time the VFW and the Legion tried to get their hands on the will, it was too late. 

The Park District and the heirs held a design competition, which local artists, Frederick Hibbard and Elizabeth Haseltine Hibbard, won. Elizabeth Haseltine designed my favorite part, the fawn. Haseltine taught at the University of Chicago and assisted Lorado Taft. She was acclaimed for her Baby Pegasus sculpture, which she exhibited several times at the Art Institute. I suspect Baby Pegasus would have delighted Wallach, but Haseltine wanted something naturalistic to match Caldwell’s landscape. I also suspect the artists wanted a rounded shape atop the streamlined Art Deco base. 

The base, designed by Frederick Hibbard, is Dakota Mahogany granite. It’s polished to protect it from the weather even though it’s very hard rock billions of years old. They clearly wanted a monument that would last. By 1939, working horses were rare. There were bridle paths nearby, but the committee argued that horses couldn’t access the Point. They abandoned trying to fit a horse trough into the design. I have a theory that the horse trough interrupted their Art Deco streamlining. Instead, the committee accommodated “men and beasts” with a low basin for dogs and three drinking fountains sized for children.  

Certainly the Tribune huffed about it. They ran a headline that you could lead a horse to this fountain, but there was nowhere for a horse to drink. That's not entirely true. I have seen a horse drink from it, but it is better for birds, dogs, and children. I think David Wallach would have liked helping the children.

For more about Haseltine and the history of the fawn: Hyde Park Stories: Elizabeth Haseltine and the Fawn (trishmorse.blogspot.com)

Elizabeth Haseltine and the Fawn

University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf2-09143], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

As with so many women, it’s hard to find information about Elizabeth Haseltine (1894-1950). I have been looking because she’s the artist who created my favorite Hyde Park public art, the fawn on the top of the David Wallach fountain. Her husband, Frederick C. Hibbard (1881-1950) designed the base. I love the contrast of the naturalistic fawn and the Art Deco base. 

David Wallach had died in 1894, leaving money to the city for a fountain for “men and beasts.” Nothing happened. Finally, David Wallach’s heirs sued the Park District in the 1930s for an accounting. As a result, a committee for the fountain was formed of the Park District and the heirs. They launched a design competition. 

The competition was won by Frederick Hibbard and Elizabeth Haseltine Hibbard of 1201 East 60th Street near the Midway Studios of Lorado Taft. Haseltine taught at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute and assisted Lorado Taft. 

Originally in the Herald. Hibbard and Haseltine showing off the winning design from the Chicago Park District Special Collections

She specialized in statues of animals, studying the animals at Lincoln Park Zoo for inspiration. Haseltine had three sculptures in the newly finished 1935 Japanese garden: a squirrel, a kingfisher, and a great blue heron carved out of tulipwood and placed near the waterfall entering the lily pond. She liked to work from nature, spending hours at the Lincoln Park Zoo studying her subjects. 

Elizabeth Haseltine working on the clay mock up of the fawn. Tribune October 30, 1939

She exhibited regularly in a large annual art show. The Tribune critic called her statue of a cat “whimsical” and “clever.” One year she showed Pegasus as a colt. The Tribune critic said, “This is one of the most graceful and admirable figures one could find in a year’s search. It is delicate, true, simple, and fascinating.” Which is what I feel about the fawn.

The Point was created in the late 1920s when the lakefront was expanded. The photo at this link shows the landfill beginning: http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/10584.html

For a while it wasn't landscaped. The Shoreland valets used it as a parking lot for the guests. But in 1936, the WPA helped finance a new look--the tunnel under what was then called Leif Erickson Drive, electrical, water, and sewer systems, and a new landscape. Alfred Caldwell designed a landscape of an open meadow, native plants, and stone council circles.

As the Point took shape according to Caldwell's vision, the heirs of David Wallach, who were living in the Parkshore and had a front row seat for the changes, wanted David's fountain placed on the Point.

Frederick created the base  "along modernistic lines" using Dakota Mahogany granite mined near St. Cloud, Minnesota. There are three fountains for humans on each side and the back, and one fountain for "beasts" at the front. There are abstract floral motifs in the polished granite. The polish enables the stone to withstand the weather. It was dedicated in December 1939, and there the fawn slept through the USO picnics at the Point during the war, the huge crowds of sunbathers during the 1950s, and the Nike missile installation of the 1960s. There she slept until 1981, when she suddenly disappeared.

A dog walker came out from under the tunnel on October 21 and realized there was no fawn. The dog walker immediately contacted the alderman and the police. The Hyde Park Herald printed the fawn's picture and an anonymous donor offered $200 for her recovery.

Fawns sleep all tucked up under brush, even with predators stalking about. They won't move until their mothers return. Haseltine's fawn also waited. A Hyde Parker, poking around a salvage warehouse, suddenly spotted her tucked up and hiding among the architectural detritus. He called the alderman and the Area One crimes unit and the fawn was safe again. The thieves had gotten a mere $150 for it.

When it became known that she had been fenced to the salvage warehouse on October 8 and the full-time Park District supervisor whose office was in the Point fieldhouse hadn't noticed her missing for two whole weeks and hadn't bothered to report the park benches that had been chopped up and vandalized at the same time, the citizens of Hyde Park were incensed. As the Herald said, the patronage-ridden bureaucracy of the Parks could care less about a "small charming beloved landmark in a small charming beloved South Side park" and so the citizens organized the Friends of the Point. 

I first wrote a version of this post in 2010. Since then, a detailed account has appeared in a Hyde Park Historical Society article. Check out vol41nos123_autumn2019finalB.pdf (hydeparkhistory.org)

Grant Tree

The question of monuments was being much discussed in Chicago in 2020, with a commission contemplating removing or annotating many of the iconic works that are part of a Chicagoan’s mental map. Included on the list is the statue of Grant on horseback in Lincoln Park. Not on the list for the monuments commission is a monument to Grant that’s barely on anyone’s mental map—a small boulder with a carved message in the middle of the grass in Washington Park. It says "Tree Planted by Ulysses S. Grant December Sixth, 1879." There's no tree nearby, let alone one planted by Grant. 

It's located just south of 51st St. on Cottage Grove. Follow Payne Drive west. When you reach the armory turn right and follow a curving driveway into a parking lot. The boulder is north and slightly east of the parking lot.

Photo of a Boulder with a hard to read carving sitting near a parking lot. Photo by George Rumsey

So the search for answers took me through the shaky foundations of history, memory, and meaning--with a larger question that's been bothering me for a while, What do monuments do?

I suspect that for at least 80 years one approach has been to deny them power through general snark about the pompous past. Certainly that was Atlas Obscura’s answer to the meaning of the boulder—they created a story about Grant tossing some seeds in the ground to plant an oak (They could at least have gone for verisimilitude and had him toss acorns). I was suspicious that wasn't the answer to the boulder's question. A couple of seeds rarely turn into trees worthy of boulders. 

The first answer I hit in the Chicago Tribune was a very long article from 1899 interviewing a long-time fan of the tree. The article starts out, “Guarding the northeastern entrance to Washington Park stands a giant elm. Everybody admires it and a few regard it with sentiments of genuine affection. Its friends call it Grant’s elm. Few of the trees among the thousands in Chicago have more reason to rear themselves in proud solitude and to lord it over lesser growths. Old-timers in Chicago remember well the great Sanitary Fair in Dearborn Park in the spring of 1865. But best of all they remember the acclaim with which the victorious Generals Grant and Sherman were received at that fair and at the public reception in the old Crosby Opera House. But comparatively few recall the ceremonies which were carried out at that time in the pretty village of Hyde Park.” 

Photo of the lone elm tree without a boulder. The caption says it was planted in 1865. From the Chicago Tribune of 1899

I suspect few remember because it didn’t happen, not in 1865 anyway. There wasn't even a park in 1865. But Ephraim H. Cummings remembered. He’d been living in Chicago since 1837 and he told the journalist that his great concern was for the survival of the elm—because non-native trees don’t survive long in the Hyde Park sand. He remembered that it was his suggestion that the Grant elm be given a chance at survival by digging a basin in the clay that's under the sand, filling the basin with gravel and black earth. The article focuses on Cummings' conviction that trees need companions in order to be healthy and his argument that the elm needed companion trees. Now that scientists have researched how tree root systems communicate with each other through mycorrhiza, it's clear that's one thing Cummings got right.  

It seems fairly obvious in this 1899 account that there was no boulder monument to correct the great details that Cummings added to the story that didn’t happen. There's no sign of a boulder in the photo with the article. Perhaps this article triggered a movement to plant the boulder there. All I could find is that the boulder appeared "some years" after the tree was planted. 

By 1912, the boulder had been there a number of years. There’s a letter in the Tribune complaining that the boulder is wrong. The boulder at that time said that the tree had been planted in November 1879. Instead, it had clearly been planted in December and he'd found an article in the Tribune to prove it.

I can see why they got the date wrong if someone remembered the year. That fall of 1879, Grant was making a procession across the states, saying farewell to public life. The veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic and even the Mexican-American War were pouring into the cities by the thousands to say a passionate farewell to their leader. It would have made sense to have a ceremony then. The Tribune details event after event--parades, assemblies, speeches, banquets--that went on for days in November. But no tree. 

Instead, in December, the tour over, Grant returned to Chicago to spend time with his son, who lived in Chicago with his wife--the sister of Bertha Honoré Palmer. Grant's in-laws had one more event for him and 150 dignitaries, who gathered at the Palmer House to drive down to the park on the boulevards in their carriages and plant a tree. Several hundred locals gathered to watch as speeches were made. Grant said “I hope that in my future visits to your magnificent park I may see the tree which I am now about to plant growing and flourishing, and that in its growth it may be symbolical of the growth and prosperity of your magnificent city.” And with that, he threw a few shovelfuls of dirt into the hole with a nickel-plated shovel (not gold plated as Cummings remembered). Several of the others took the shovel and added their bit. The elm, which was held at a 30 degree angle by a windlass, was winched into its hole (which may or may not have had Cummings extra rich earth). The Tribune reporter of 1879 made a point of saying that the crowd was disappointed that lunch was not provided, being clearly disappointed himself.

Some time after 1912, the boulder and tree were worth a postcard, so it must have had some visitors. The flagpole is a nice touch.

 

Painted postcard of the elm, the boulder, and an American flag on a flagpole in the park, with the correct inscription, so it dates from after 1912. From Firmly Planted — U.S. Grant Cottage National Historic Landmark

Several accounts suggest the tree died in the 1930s, though without a date or details. Cummings was right to worry that it was lonely in its nutrient-poor sandy soil, however, it would have succumbed anyway in the 1970s when Dutch elm disease swept through the South Parks.

The Park District took the tree and left the boulder. In 1960, a person who stumbled across it, wrote to the Tribune, wondering what the story was. The Tribune didn’t bother to find out but ran this cartoon. 

Editorial cartoon of a man in a suit wondering, "Was it Washington in Grant Park?" next to the boulder. from the Chicago Tribune

The Park District decided to plant a Kentucky Coffee Tree there after the reporter asked about the boulder. But the Coffee Tree didn’t want to live in the lonely, nutrient-poor sand of Hyde Park either. 

So, it does show what some monuments are good for--people ask questions, though not too often. In 2014, someone asked Geoffrey Baer, the font of all things Chicago, about it. He too found the account in the December 7, 1879, edition of the Chicago Tribune and focused on its lament over the missing lunch. Ask Geoffrey: 7/9 | Chicago News | WTTW 

But for me, the monument taught me something new about Grant. I'd kept wondering, why a tree, especially when it became clear that he planted quite a few trees, even one that still lives in Japan. The hard-driving military tactician who drank too much and smoked too many cigars. Why would even his in-laws think he wanted to plant a tree?

I’ve read Grant's stirring well-written memoir. I knew his reputation in the Civil War and in his administration--though obviously not enough. And I knew that he’d launched crushing colonization of indigenous lands through things like the Homestead Act and military action in the West. That's why the survival of his statue in Lincoln Park is a focus of the monuments commission. 

But what I hadn’t known until I tried to find out about this missing tree was his faith in the power and beauty of trees to be the lungs of the earth and an inspiration. He’d created Yellowstone as the world's first national park. He helped launch the unofficial holiday of Arbor Day, which encourages everyone to plant trees. He created legislation to encourage the homesteaders on the plains to plant windbreaks of trees to conserve the land. In ceremony after ceremony, he planted trees around the country and even overseas as a symbol of hope that the young tree would outlast short human lives. 

I learned about this unexpected aspect here, on the website of the cabin where he spent his last years, which explains so much. Firmly Planted — U.S. Grant Cottage National Historic Landmark

I'm glad to learn all that about Grant from his cryptic boulder, but sad to learn that in Washington, D.C., they planted a Bur Oak. If Grant had planted a Bur Oak in Washington Park, a tree that evolved to thrive in our bad soil, it would almost certainly be there by its boulder today. 

 (Tree elevation looking south - Grant Memorial Bur Oak , Union Square, Southeast of Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, Washington, District of Columbia, DC | Library of Congress (loc.gov)j)

Clara Louise Burnham

 

I bumped into Clara Louise Burnham, nee Root, while researching the Columbian Exposition. She wrote a novel of the Fair called Sweet Clover: A Romance of the White City. Clover is the lead character. The plot is just barely enough to hold the novel together, but, unlike the brief diaries, she describes the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of the Fair--and of the transformation of Hyde Park for the Fair. 

Clara was one of the early settlers of Hyde Park and lived here most of her life. She went to the reunions that the early settlers held in the 1920s. And one of the things that struck me about Sweet Clover, is the lament of the Hyde Parker that “their” Hyde Park was changing.

Clara’s father was a composer most famous for “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys of Marching”, anthems of the Union Army in the Civil War. He moved the family to Hyde Park in 1858 and founded a successful music publishing business, which lost all its inventory in the 1871 fire and had to rebuild from bankruptcy.

During the rebuilding, Clara married a lawyer named Walter Burnham, who was apparently completely unremarkable—at least, to the newspapers. He died young. After that, Clara moved in with her father, spending summers with the family in their cottage on the coast of Maine. In her last years, she lived in the Cooper-Carleton (now the Del Prado). She started writing around 1880, possibly when Walter was ailing and the family was struggling.

She very successful. She published 26 novels, sold half a million copies, and had a national audience. Several of Burnham’s books were made into plays and movies. The movie version of Jewel came out in 1915 and was remade in 1923 as A Chapter of Her Life--directed by a woman, Lois Weber. Clara’s name appeared above the stars on the poster, so her fame lasted in her lifetime. She died in 1927 at the family cottage in Maine.

Burnham was a Christian Scientist and three of her novels took that as a theme: The Right Princess, Jewel, and The Leaven of Love. They were praised by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, herself, who called her a “metaphysical surgeon.” Later, Eddy asked her to change the endings so the romantic couple didn’t marry and finally said that Christian Science couldn’t endorse fiction in any form. That had to have hurt.

Rosalie Buckingham

 

Rosalie Buckingham around the time she's making Rosalie Villa (posted on Pinterest, unknown source)

I feel like a Women’s History Month of women in Hyde Park should include Rosalie Buckingham. She’s famous now from the BBC series about her husband—Harry Selfridge.

She was born in Chicago in 1860 and, though Chicago was small, the Buckinghams were already getting rich. Her grandfather built a grain elevator—and then signed a contract with the new Illinois Central Railway to be the exclusive grain elevator for all IC grain warehousing for the next 10 years. Even though Rosalie’s father died young, the family prospered. Rosalie studied music, traveled in Europe, and was Chicago high society. She was known to put on harp concerts for charity.

As she neared the age of 30 still unwed, Rosalie decided to become a property developer in the rapidly developing Hyde Park Township, which was still a separate suburb. In 1883, she bought two city blocks from 57th Street to 59th Street near the IC tracks and hired Solon S. Beman, who had just planned Pullman, to plan a development.

The plan was for 42 villas (villa = no rooms for live in servants) and smaller artists’ cottages. It included landscaping, a park, infrastructure development (sewer, paved street, sidewalks, lighting) and, on 57th Street, a three-story clubhouse on one corner and across the street an inn, café, and music hall with a business block with all the conveniences—drugstore, grocery store, reading room. The street was to be named Rosalie Court and the café was the Café Red Roses. She broke the pattern of naming things for herself when it came to the little park—that officially is Sylvia Court. Rosalie and her agents believed in marketing, putting out a brochure in 1884 “Rosalie Villas; or, How to Buy a Homestead.” There was a sequel brochure of photos called “A Holiday at Rosalie Villas” in 1889 that bragged that it was a model for development that beautified other cities.

The plans announced in an 1884 Tribune article called for ornamental granite and wrought iron arches on 57th and 59th as the proud owners entered the street, fountains in the park, and shade trees. A purchaser had “the employment of a capable consulting architect to insure a harmonious plan of building.” No rogue houses for Rosalie.

Beman drew up design standards, which is why the street has a similar feel, though it had several architects. The houses were set back the same distance, with a driveway next to each one, leading to a stable behind the house. A few of the lots were divided so no driveway and a few of the lots have attached houses. The idea was that these would be nice homes for the middle-class or get-away cottages for the well-heeled, conveniently right by the IC station, cooled by lake breezes (because the tracks were ground level), and far from the coal soot etc. of downtown Chicago. They could even commute on the cable car. 

The houses sold quickly—and Rosalie was quickly out of the real estate business and ready for her next adventure--marrying Selfridge in 1890.

Grandpa’s grain elevator deal made another branch of the family wealthy as well. Kate Buckingham was one of Rosalie’s bridesmaids and Clarence was one of Harry Selfridge’s groomsmen. Ten years after Rosalie’s death of the Spanish Flu, Kate donated Buckingham Fountain in memory of Clarence. 

(Credit: Hyde Park Historical Society)

Ida Noyes

 

credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-01238], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Ida Noyes lives on in memory because her husband built the truly beautiful hall in her name. I suspect she’s more interesting than admirable (or maybe likable--there seem to be a lot of squabbles mentioned in the newspapers)—but then I haven’t seen her letters and photos yet. 

She was born in 1853 in upstate New York and traveled with her parents and four siblings to frontier Iowa in 1857 at the age of 4. She managed to go to college, getting a degree in 1874 from the State University at Ames. She taught school for a couple of years before marrying La Verne Noyes, who had also been born in upstate New York and had met her at Ames. La Verne had a hay tool business until he saw Ida struggle to handle Webster’s unabridged dictionary, so he invented a wire dictionary stand, that became fairly successful. He sold his hay tool business and they moved to Chicago in 1879, where La Verne pursued his inventing. Ida pursued her interest in art, studying at the very beginning forms of the School of the Art Institute. She was particularly interested in photography.

La Verne turned his attention to other inventions. In 1884, he invented several kinds of adding machines and in 1886 patented (with his engineer Thomas Perry) the Aeromotor windmill, which generated electricity. It quickly became the leading manufacturer of windmills and later electrical transmission lines. In other words, La Verne and Ida were now rich, really rich. They lived in an elegant mansion at 1450 N. Lake Shore Drive. And Ida decided to travel. La Verne was busy, so Ida traveled without him.

She wrote home and took photos (letters and photos in the Regenstein Library), so La Verne got to hear about France, Italy, Egypt, Algeria, Tunis, Israel, Turkey, Spain, India, China, Burma (now Myanmar), Japan, and Hawaii. She took over 2000 photos on her longest trip. La Verne and Ida did get to travel together to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska in 1894 when it was still a frontier.

When Ida managed to stay in Chicago, her interests lay in clubs devoted to improving the lives of high society. The Twentieth Century Club was a cultural and literary club composed of “members from the city’s best families.” The Women’s Athletic Club, founded in 1898, was the first athletic club for women in America, open to the wives of prominent men. She was also an officer in several capacities for the Daughters of the American Revolution. It wasn’t enough to be able to document that an ancestor fought in the American Revolution. One had to be voted in as one of the “right people.”

Then, in 1912, Ida died. La Verne was heart-broken. He decided she needed an impressive memorial that would serve to help women in their passion for self-development and women’s athletics. He decided to donate $500,000 to build the truly beautiful hall at the University of Chicago. Women at the time could not use the men’s facilities and didn’t have a space for recreation, social life, and athletics. Ida Noyes Hall was lavishly ornate, with a lovely pool, complete with sea horses, a gymnasium, a theatre, and lots of gathering places. The Hall opened in 1916. Unfortunately, it’s now part of the Business School Quad and the pool and gymnasium and some of the other features are gone, but the beautiful details and the lovely portraits of Ida and La Verne at the first landing remain.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 5

 

This is the photo that accompanied one of her obituaries in the Tribune and I just love it.

Annie was deeply loyal to her friends and her projects. She continued with the Chicago Woman’s club, which was in high gear after 1900—fighting for the vote and improving the lives of those who suffered in the ever-expanding city. She continued with the Fortnightly Club and her local Fortnightly Club, the Lyceum as it morphed into the Blackstone Library, and she continued with the Helen Heath settlement house. In 1885, she had helped found the Kenwood Evangelical Church, which built a chapel just around the corner on what might have been Hitchcock land, and she remained involved in its organization. The circle of her friends seems to have just kept expanding.

When Hitchcock Hall was ready to open in 1902, 21 years after Charles’s death, 1500 people showed up for the party in the hall. They checked out the beautiful furnishings and the elaborate frieze in the library created by Dwight Perkins and sculptor Richard Bock. Annie and William Rainey Harper stood at the head of a receiving line as people streamed in. The Tribune covered it, commenting, “many prominent people took part in the ceremonies.”

Annie herself hosted the laborers and craftsmen in a party to thank them for their work. Annie, of course, wasn’t done. She continued to take a “keen interest in the administration and equipment of the hall”—and the students. In particular, students remembered “the cheer dispensed” to any of them who were stranded in Chicago over the Christmas holidays. Every year, she invited them all to her house for an elaborate breakfast on Christmas morning.

In 1919, the students helped celebrate Annie’s 80th birthday. George H. McDonald gave a speech, saying that “Hitchcock had been a home to him and that Annie was the mother in it.” He also remembered that, during World War I, the dorm had been taken over by the Army as a barracks and Annie had removed her "treasures"--the furniture from her parents and Charles's books--and protected them in her house.

I suspect that her own finances had gotten a bit difficult by then. She’d worked out a deal with the First Trust and Savings Bank so they bought her remaining Kenwood house and land though she got to remain in the house with the people who had worked for her. Though her resources had been poured into her memorial to Charles and her parents, she was still looking for ways to change people’s lives.

I had found it puzzling to read in her obituary that she had died in Berea, Kentucky. She had no close relatives to move in with and certainly not in Kentucky. It turns out, at the age of 83, she had traveled to Berea to see if she could help Berea College. Berea had been founded before the Civil War as an integrated tuition-free education for the people who lived in the mountains of Kentucky. The state had forced segregation in 1904, so Berea had split into two schools, devoted to offering low-income students an education. As a speaker at her funeral noted, “her ardent spirit outran her failing strength” and she died on her trip. To the end, she was devoted to the idea of giving people without means access to an education.

At her funeral, her active pallbearers were students from Hitchcock Hall. The honorary pallbearers were a crowd of people—her intimate friends and representatives from all the institutions she’d touched. She was laid to rest in Oakwoods Cemetery next to Charles.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 4

Here Annie is seated in a row with William Rainey Harper (first president of the university and a force of nature on the right) and John D. Rockefeller (wealthiest man in America in the top hat). I love the expression of enduring all the speechifying but also, I think, pleasure that she had reached this day. She’d faced down Harper and gotten what she wanted.

By 1889, she was the last of her close family. Her beloved Charles was gone. She kept up her interests in the Fortnightly Club and the Chicago Woman’s Club and supporting the settlement house—saying they kept her from being so lonesome--but she was very aware that she was the “keeper of the mementos,” not just of her family but of a lost Chicago. The city had 4,000 people when she was born. It was over a million in 1890 and doubling every decade. Development surrounded her home, which was no longer a rural oasis, especially after selling off the farmland to support herself. The World’s Fair was about to transform the neighborhood and city.

One change grabbed her attention and the attention of the Chicago Woman’s Club--the plans for a coeducational university in Hyde Park, where women would have the same coursework, tuition, and degree as the men. The university talks about the individual donors, but the Tribune at the time pointed to the organizing efforts of the Chicago Woman’s Club: ”To the Chicago Woman’s Club is due much credit for the favorable outcome of the plans for women’s dormitories. There had been a movement on foot for some time looking to the building of one or more halls, but with no material success until a meeting of the Womans’ Club was held in the spring of [1892]. Dr. Harper appeared before the club and spoke regarding the plans he had hoped to carry out.”

By 1899, Annie had a plan for how to insure that Charles and her father would be remembered. She would donate her share of the real estate that Charles had bought back in the 1860s on the edge of the city to finance the construction of a men’s dorm. That real estate is now One North LaSalle, worth $200,000 in 1899 (about $6 million today). Worth a heck of a lot more now!

The architect she wanted was Dwight Heald Perkins. Perkins was the son of Annie’s childhood friend, Marion Perkins, whose husband had died early. Dwight had dropped out of high school to support the family and happened to get a job as an errand boy for an architectural firm and discovered his calling. Annie paid his tuition and expenses to the architectural school at MIT. He was so talented, he graduated early for a job with Burnham and Root, whose office had expanded in the build-up to the Columbian Exposition. After the fair, he started his own firm.

In 1898, a number of paths crossed. Jenkins Lloyd Jones was the Unitarian minister who sponsored the settlement house that Annie supported. Jones wanted to build a modern building to house a complex of services called the Abraham Lincoln Center. Jones hired his nephew—Frank Lloyd Wright. When Jones found that Wright was hard to work with, he brought in Perkins, who was also devoted to the Prairie School of architecture, to work with Wright. I like to imagine Annie confronting the very young Frank Lloyd Wright.

Now, in 1899, Annie wanted Dwight to design her Charles Hitchcock Hall. So she wrote to the University of Chicago.

First, Harper and the male trustees tried to convince her to just donate money so they could match a grant from Rockefeller. Annie said no—it’s a dorm named for Charles.

Then Harper and the trustees insisted that the architect had to be their standard neo-Gothic one, Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge. Annie wrote back (quoting Susan O’Connor Davis book) “I am not content that the building should be put up as my expression of an adequate memorial to my husband, and as my ideal of what a boy’s dormitory should be, when I have not been consulted at all.”

Harper decided that they would humor her, pretending to consult Dwight, while having the real plans drawn up by their architect. When Annie found out, she rewrote the contract, spelling out her role in approving the plans. In 1900, she sailed to Europe with Dwight and his wife, who had joined the Fortnightly Club, to get ideas.

The exterior of Hitchcock Hall blends with the neo-Gothic theme of the Quads, but the interior was Prairie School. It included a room with the furniture that her parents had brought to Illinois on the Erie Canal and a library with Charles’s books. Annie wrote, “The great satisfaction with anything I place in Hitchcock Hall is that the Trustees promise me it shall remain forever a part of the Memorial." Unfortunately, she apparently didn’t put that in the contract. It’s not clear that anything other than the building survives.

In 1901, she laid the cornerstone. In 1902, when everything was done to her satisfaction, she hosted a party for all of the laborers and craftsmen who worked on it to thank them for building Charles Hitchcock Hall. I think she’d like knowing that it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

Annie McClure Hitchcock Part 3

 

[Annie probably actually looked like the photo in Part 2 but I already used that one, so here's her beloved library. You can picture her sitting there with Charles.]

In 1873, only two years after the fire, Annie’s friend Kate Doggett, who was a militant suffragist nationally and internationally, decided to create a club that would meet every other week, dubbed the Fortnightly Club, for a select group of women who hungered for education. It apparently was a big deal to be one of the 12 charter members (there were noses out of joint about not being a charter member) but Annie was one of them, along with several more of her life-long friends. The club basically served for the college education that this generation had been denied. Members researched a topic and presented a paper to the others. Some of them were topics of the day like education or urban life. At a time when it was seen as too manly for women to study Classical Literature, Annie’s papers had topics like "Historians and Biographers: Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Nepos, Suetonius" and "The Greek Commanders in the Persian Wars."

A number of women invited to join the Fortnightly Club had to turn down the invitation because their husbands did not allow them to leave their proper sphere in the home. Charles of course supported Annie. She found the club so invigorating that in 1875 she founded a separate Fortnightly Club in Kenwood, which met the rest of her life. In 1876, a new club formed—the Chicago Woman’s Club. Though somewhat similar in that papers were read and speakers spoke--, the club quickly developed committees and devoted itself to addressing the problems of the ever-expanding city: juvenile justice, educational reform, women’s vote, domestic violence.

The Chicago Woman’s Club was the powerhouse behind the Chicago settlement houses, which provided a wide range of social services. Annie adopted the Helen Heath Settlement House on 531 West 33rd Place, probably because her lifelong friend Marion Perkins was involved. I tried to find information on the Helen Heath Settlement House specifically, but it was in the shadow of the larger ones. The Helen Heath Settlement House was a project of Jenkins Lloyd Jones, minister of the All Soul's Unitarian Church, who did say he was using Hull House as inspiration for his far less destitute part of town. Part of the offerings would be gymnasiums, classes, workingmen’s clubs, industrial arts, women’s “domestic arts,” and support groups. One of the things I did notice is that the services that were noted in the newspapers were a day care for young children of working mothers, a club—not unlike the Fortnightly—that could also act as a support group, and musical performances. The paper noted the children’s appearance in the choir ranged from rags to well-dressed, but their voices blended into beautiful music. I have the feeling that Annie believed that people on hard times needed to feed their souls and lift their horizons. Annie eventually endowed a traveling fellowship in Greek.

A lot of Annie’s appearances in the paper involve fund raising for the settlement house by hosting performances of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on her lawn and balls at the Chicago Beach Hotel. She supported the Helen Heath Settlement the rest of her life.

With the fire, people had moved south from the city and the population of Hyde Park township boomed, particularly in the more working class areas of Hyde Park around 53rd. Annie worried that people without means did not have access to books, so she rented a storefront on 53rd near Lake Park, in the center of Hyde Park, and created the Hyde Park Lyceum—a lending library of books and a place for free lectures. Annie was president but she recruited her friends to donate cash and books and argued that having books conveniently available, particularly for the young, was a critical service. In other words, she argued for the need for a branch library in Hyde Park. One of her friends was Mrs. Blackstone—and so it was through Annie that the idea of the Blackstone Branch Library was born, the first branch library in Chicago.

In the midst of this activity, tragedy struck. Charles became terribly ill from a failing heart for a number of years, developing agonizing edema. He died in 1881, to an out-pouring of grief from his community. In 1883, Annie lost her mother. Most of her siblings were gone. She alone survived.