The Names They Are a Changin'

A lot of cities I've lived in (and I've lived in a lot of cities) have changed the names of their streets over time.  I've always been impressed that Chicago hangs on to its street names longer than most of the other places I've lived.  Perhaps its because in Chicago an "Honorary" street name sign can be added to a block or two without having to change the street's official name.

But last week while wandering around I stumbled across two deprecated street names still living on old buildings.

The first was on the block with Blue Chicago.  The peeling paint proclaimed the address as "536 Heritage Place."  Was Clark Street once known as Heritage Place?  I checked the Chicago Tribune archive and found no reference to Heritage Place.  I asked the Municipal Reference Team at the Chicago Public Library (your tax dollars at work!) and got this response:

As far as we can tell Clark Street has never had another name. Clarke [sic] street was shown on the original plat maps of Chicago. See the Encyclopedia of Chicago at: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/10634.html

Prior to the Great Fire of 1871 Clarke Street had been extended north and south to at least the five hundred numbers. Since most or all of the buildings on Clark were burned during the fire, your building would have to been more recent, and definitley been built on Clark.

See for example: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/10343.html

Furthermore we are unable to find any evidence of any street named "Heritage".

I'll do a little more research on this, but if anyone can explain this, please leave a comment below.

The second location was up near the Lincoln Park Zoo.  The building at 2100 North Lincoln Park West has carved on its south side "Garfield Avenue" indicating that the street we now call Dickens once bore the name of a president, not a scribe.

It happened around 1934.  In that year, the City Club of Chicago came up with a list of 41 street names it considered confusing, duplicative, or redundant.  One of them was Garfield Avenue.  The City Club proposed changing Garfield Avenue to Dickens because of confusion with Garfield Boulevard in the Garfield Park section of Chicago.

Not surprisingly, there were Chicago Aldermen against the change.  Alderman Caughlin was quoted in the July 27th, 1934 edition of the Chicago Tribune as saying, "If a dozen streets named Lincoln were in Chicago... I wouldn't favor a change in any of them."

Other streets that got their names changed include Grove Avenue, which became South Clark Street; Center Street, which became Armitage Avenue; and Austin Avenue which became what we now know as Hubbard Street.

That's an interesting point because Hubbard Street is what lent its name to the series of freeway underpasses known as "Hubbard's Cave."  You can read the article we wrote last month about the history of Hubbard's Cave.  And by coincidence, just today while strolling along Wacker Drive I cam across this plaque noting the location of "Hubbard's Folly:"

So, who the heck was Hubbard?

He was Gurdon S. Hubbard (I've also seen it written "Gordon S. Hubbard"), the owner of Hubabrd & Company, who was a pioneering businessman.  And by "pioneering" I mean he opened shop in Chicago back when there wasn't much here but Indians, fur trappers, and wild onions.  His specialty was meat packing and this hog butcher to America went out of business around the time Philip Armour left the California gold fields for Chicago and became "Hog Butcher to the World."

The Say Good-Bye Gallery

Many of the more enduring memories I have of being a child in the 1970's were of the horrible predictions of things to come.  For some reason the teachers I had in school were always teaching us about things that would very shortly bring about the end of the world.

I remember being taught that there's not enough food in America to support 300 million people.  Now we have 350 million and we're mostly fat.

I remember being taught that the world would run out of water by 1985.  Chicago just had its wettest summer in decades.

I remember being taught that the next ice age was at hand and that the earth was in danger of freezing.  Now we're all aquiver about global warming.

I remember being taught that we'd all die of cancer because of the ozone hole.  Now kids ask, "The ozone what?"

Latch-key kids, crack babies, MSG, and Pac-Man were all signs of the apocalypse.

In summary, every bad thing that could happen would, and we'd all be dead before we finished puberty.  The best scientists of the day firmly believed in Global Cooling/New Ice Age and it made the covers of the news magazines.  Maybe the nuns exposed us to it all in order to give us another reason to pray.

I don't think it was just the nuns who were caught up in environmental hysteria back then.  Check out the "Say Good-Bye Gallery" painted along the railroad viaduct along West Hubbard Street at North Union Street.

The faded and peeling paint proclaims, "Dedicated to our endangered species."  On the wall are murals showing many of the creatures that people in 1974 thought they would shortly have to live without.

It's hard to make out most of the critters, but it provides an interesting glimpse into the mindset of people at the time.  It also shows how nature ultimately wins all battles, since there are trees now blocking where the mural was painted.

Of course, as man can destroy, man can also preserve.  And while I don't go in for a lot of the "green" hype that's thrown around these days, I am above average in my environmental responsibility according to Al Gore's web site.

Let's just hope mountain lions and coyotes really don't start marching down Wacker Drive in search of human blood because there's no water in the prairies for them to drink.

Time for Architecture

There are some cities in the world where you don't need a watch.  Wherever you are there are buildings and posts, and towers, and signs adorned with a variety of clocks.

Chicago isn't one of those cities.

The kind of clocks we tend to get around here tend to be either few and historic or afterthoughts in Disney-inspired family-friendly fake town squares.  But not everyone has put Father Time out to pasture.

This garage at 660 West Hubbard Street could have been a boring expanse of brick. Instead, a massive clock traps the eye, distracting you from even noticing that this is an industrial building.  And check out the date stone toward the top.  The building was put up in 2001.  For a garage in a marginal area on a back street where no one will ever see it, a lot of thought was put into this.  We really appreciate the effort.

What is Hubbard's Cave?

Every day millions of people driving around Chicagoland listen to the local traffic reports on TV or the radio.  Hundreds of times a day, traffic reporters reference a place in Chicago called "Hubbard's Cave."  Travel times in and out of the Loop are calculated based on the location of this landmark.  But remarkably few people really know what it is, or what it looks like.

(The entrance [or exit] of Hubbard's Cave at West Wayman Street)

Many people are correct when they state that Hubbard's Cave is the place where interstates 90 and 94 go under Hubbard Street in West Town.  But there's a lot more to Hubbard's Cave than a simple overpass.

Hubbard's cave runs for a quarter of a mile from West Hubbard Street to West Wayman Street.  Unless you're stuck in traffic, in a car it flashes by in the blink of an eye since there are so many other things to keep your eyes on at that critical salmon run in the highway.  But up top, there's quite a lot to see.

(There's no sign of it at the surface, but traffic is humming through Hubbard's Cave beneath this parking lot.)

More than just a street underpass, Hubbard's Cave is a triple-decker infrastructure sandwich that passes beneath railroad tracks, parking lots, even entire warehouses are perched over this most vital of Chicago's motor arteries.  Now and then there are gaps in the roof allowing people to peek down into traffic.  Or more often -- allowing the traffic below brief glimpses into shafts of sunlight from above.

The earliest reference to "Hubbard's Cave" we could find in local newspapers was from 1962, and it's clear from the context that the name was already in common use by the public.  Back then what we now call the Kennedy Expressway was known as the Northwest Expressway and people traveling the route were in much more peril than today's travelers.

(Hubbard's Cave passes beneath five city streets and seven sets of railroad tracks.)

That's because of the "cave," itself.  It earned its name because its size made it unusually dark for an underpass segment of a freeway.  So drivers entering the underpass needed a few seconds for their eyes to get used to the darkness.  Then, less than a minute later, they'd be blinded by the sun as they emerged from the other end.

The name, obviously, comes from Hubbard Street above.  But there is some evidence to show that it may be WGN Radio's Irv Hayden who coined the term and made it famous.  He was 720's helicopter traffic reporter, best known for occasionally landing next to freeways and helping stranded motorists push their cards to the shoulder.  It was his use of the term that spurred city officials to do something about the "cave"-like nature of the road.

(A glimpse of the traffic through a gap in the roof.)

It's remarkable by modern standards to realize that this underpass, and perhaps many more like it, were unlit.  There were no lights underneath the bridges and viaducts that make up the cave.  It was originally thought that car headlights would be enough to successfully navigate the passage.

That changed in 1962 when the city of Chicago spent $160,000 to fix the day-night-day problem for drivers.  According to a letter to the editor in the August 26, 1964 edition of the Chicago Tribune, the city spent $20,000 covering the walls with high-gloss paint to reflect light, and another $140,000 on lights so that drivers' eyes wouldn't have to make such painful adjustments from light to dark and back to light again.

(Construction of what would become Hubbard's Cave clipped off the northeast corner of this warehouse.)

Edward Reiter, the man who spearheaded this project when he was chief engineer of the City of Chicago's Division of Subways and Superhighways (what a great department name!), lobbied to have the name of the underpass changed to "Reiter's Daylight Passage" since it was he who turned the "cave" into something else.  But, as we all know, nearly 50 years later the name remains the same.

(The other end of Hubbard's Cave.  Nature tries to reclaim the parking lot, but the plants don't realize they're not on terra firma.)