There’s a scene in Citizen Kane when Kane is celebrating his wedding to his new bride, Susan Alexander, whom he’s promised to make into an opera star. “Charlie says if I can’t (sing at the Met) he’ll build me an opera house!” Ssuan squeal. “That won’t be necessary,” Kane laughs. From there, the film immediately…
Tag: cool buildings
Al Capone and the Jewelers’ Building
In my gig as a tour director for student groups, I take a lot of other peoples’ boat tours, bus tours, and walking tours. One thing I’m always curious to see is how they’ll tell the story of Al Capone throwing parties in the dome of the Jeweler’s Building at Wabash and Wacker. According to…
Why The Ceres Statue on the Board of Trade Has No Face
When built in 1930, the 600 foot Board of Trade building that anchors LaSalle Street was the tallest building in Chicago – an honor it held for decades. Though now dwarfed by the supertall skyscrapers around it, the art deco building is still stunning to behold, and pointed out by every architecture tour. But if…
Where Was HH Holmes? A North Side building still standing
Roslyn Place, just above Lincoln Park. No topic around here keeps my occupied quite like tracing the career of H.H. Holmes, the Devil in the White City guy. Figuring out what really happened and separating fact from fiction is notoriously hard. Lately, I’ve been in the process of organizing all of my data, cataloguing all the…
Abraham Lincoln in Chicago: Ebenezer Peck’s House
In 1860, just after the election, President-elect Abraham Lincoln came to Chicago, where he’d been a regular visitor for years, to meet Hannibal Hamlin, his running mate, for the first time. They met up at the Tremont House, the hotel at Dearborn and Lake where, a couple of years before, Lincoln had made a version…
PODCAST: Inside Charlie Chaplin’s Vault
It’s one of Chicago’s best-kept secrets: we invented Hollywood. Full length movies, color movies, mockumentaries, the ratings systems, the first paid movie theatre, and a whole lot more all came out of Chicago between 1893 and the the 1910s. Heck, the first studio in Hollywood was even started by Chicago outfit. For a brief period…
The Beacon of Progess: A Skyscraper that never was
When preparations were underway for the World’s Fair in 1893, everyone wanted something that would top the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They eventually went with the giant Ferris Wheel (three times the size of the one now at Navy Pier in diameter), but the obvious choice before they landed on that was to simply make…
And the dragon comes in niiiigggghtt
Perhaps no mosaic in the city is cooler than this one – the outside of St. George’s Cathedral on Wood Street in the Ukranian Village features a big, shiny mosaic of St. George slaying a dragon. Does this dragon look like Trogdor to anyone else?