The Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal™

Monday, February 1, 2021

Chicago's Union Stock Yards Transit House Hotel (Originally the Hough House) Destroyed by Fire on January 5, 1912.

The new Hough House Hotel (1864). Renamed the Transit House which stood on the site of the future Stock Yard Inn after the 1912 fire.

This is an immense edifice is but in keeping with the greatness of all things to which the enterprise and energy of Chicago are applied. This building is named the “Hough House,” in compliment to Colonel Rosell M. Hough, one of the pioneers in the cattle and packing trade of Chicago. It is built of cream-colored bricks and in the very best style of modern hotel architecture. It cost $125,000 ($3,653,200 today) and was finished in 1854. It was leased by W. F. Tucker and Co., the popular proprietor of Briggs House, and by them furnished throughout. Its external dimensions are,130 feet front by 144 feet deep; it is six stories high and is located on the north-east quarter of the Stock Yard grounds. Burling and Baumann of Chicago, are the architects.

To those approaching or leaving the city, this immense building is a surprise. For miles, it is the only thing that breaks the expansive view over the prairies, and it is only when it is reached that the discovery is made that it is one of the necessary incidents of the Stock Yards. It is a comfortable and commodious house and is not too large for the business which is now rapidly increasing. The view from the cupola of the hotel is remarkably fine, commanding a view of the lake, the city, and the boundless prairie to the south.

The hotel is supplied with water from a well dug in the courtyard. At a depth of forty-five feet, a layer of rock was struck, and five feet below that water was obtained. This water rises in the well to within ten feet of the surface, and, as is supposed, to the level of the lake, from which it is evidently supplied. It is therefore inexhaustible. The water is forced into a tank upon the top of the building and is thus distributed through the various rooms..

The new six-story hotel was named the Hough House in 1854 in honor of Colonel Rosell M. Hough, founder of the Chicago Union Stock Yards. The hotel contained an exchange, bank, eating saloon, telegraph rooms, brokers’ offices, etc. It was later it was renamed the Transit House.

CHICAGO HOTEL IS GUTTED.

Chicago, January 5, 1912. — The Transit House, a six-story brick hotel and restaurant at the Union Stock Yards was badly damaged by fire this afternoon. The flames started while the hotel, which is a gathering place for stockmen from all parts of the country, was crowded with guests.

Transit House, Union Stock Yards, Chicago

It was reported that a number of girls in the servant's quarters on the top floor of the burning building were trapped. Firemen who raised ladders rescued some of the women but were said to have been driven back by the flames before all who were cut off from the stairs had been carried to safety.

Later it was declared that all those on the upper floors had been rescued. Many of the guests had exciting escapes. A livestock commission merchant and his wife were so benumbed by the cold that they could not descend the fire escapes and were carried to the ground by firemen. At 2 o'clock the firemen declared that the flames were under control.

BATTALION CHIEF LACEY REPORTS

“The building, which was located on Forty-second and Halsted Streets, was 200×150 feet in dimensions, built of brick and wood, six stories high and about 46 years old. The outside walls were brick and there were no partition walls except those which divided the various rooms. The fire started in the kitchen at 10:07 p. m. and was stopped in the south wing after it had burned about twenty-four hours. An alarm was sent in by a Snap Register Watch Service and responded to by 35 engines and four truck companies. The hotel was equipped with a few house lines and chemical extinguishers and outside fire escapes, which enabled the 50 odd employees to make a successful escape. When the firemen reached the scene the flames were burning in the south wing from basement to roof. With 25,000 feet of hose laid and 40 single and double hydrants available, the department kept 35 streams at work until the flames were completely under control."

THE STOCK YARD INN

The Stock Yard Inn was erected in 1912 immediately after the Transit House fire at Halsted and Root Streets (now Exchange Avenue {41st Street}), right by the International Amphitheater. It had 175 comfortable rooms and a number of meeting halls, public and private dining rooms including the Saddle and Sirloin Club. It was designed originally for the accommodation of stockmen having business in the Chicago market—the world's largest center of livestock trade. It was of authentic Tudor architecture, rated the finest example of that type of construction in the Midwest.

Stock Yard Inn

The Stock Yard Inn was intimately associated with America's livestock industry. Here the men who do the spade-work that puts meat on the tables of America have foregathered over the years to enjoy each other's society, to consummate fabulous trades, and to participate in the finest cuisine known from coast to coast.

Guests at the Stock Yard Inn included presidents Roosevelt, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in the Amphitheater, the Inn was a center of political wheeling and dealing. The Inn also played host to other prominent and distinguished people from the U.S. and other countries—particularly Great Britain and Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Stock Yard Inn's last improvement was the Sirloin Room Restaurant where diners would select their own steaks, tableside, and brand their initials into the meat with a hot iron. It was one of Chicago's finest dining rooms. Quality of service was its pride.

But when the Stockyards were closed in 1971, it marked the beginning of the end for the Stock Yard Inn. Unable to attract significant business, the Stock Yard Inn was demolished in January 1977.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

[1] Colonel Rosell M. Hough, after the Civil War, Colonel Hough was elected the first president of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce in 1864, and served as a founder of the Chicago Union Stock Yards, and supervised its construction until it opened in June of 1865.

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Vivian Dorothea Maier, the Unknown Chicagoland Urban Photographer.

When John Maloof, a real estate agent, amateur historian, and garage-sale obsessive, acquired a box of photographic materials and personal detritus at an auction in suburban Chicago in 2007, he quickly realized that he had stumbled upon an unknown master of street photography. But despite his vigorous snooping, he could find no record of Vivian Maier, the name scribbled on the scraps of paper that he found among the negatives, prints, and undeveloped rolls of film. He tracked down the rest of the boxes emptied from an abandoned storage garage, amassing a collection of hundreds of thousands of frames shot in New York, Chicago, France, South America, and Asia between the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-seventies.

Two years after he bought the first box, he Googled the name again and, to his surprise, found an obituary announcing that Vivian Maier had died only a few days before. The short text had just enough information for Maloof to deduce that Maier had worked as a nanny in suburban Chicago.

My Personal Favorite Vivian Maier Photograph. What a Happy Cat.

Vivian Dorothea Maier was born in New York, New York, on February 1, 1926. She spent much of her childhood in France, starting at the age of four in 1930. She briefly lived in close quarters with a noted female photographer, Jeanne Bertrand, who may have taught the young Maier how to take pictures when she was a girl. After 1949 she moved back to New York City, learning English by going to movie theaters.

In 1951 she came to Chicago to work as a nanny for a North Shore family. She worked for several north shore families over the next 40 years. Maier was a very private person who pursued her photography interest in her spare time and on days off. She never showed her photographs to anyone.

Vivian Maier Self Portrait

Most of Maier's photographs were taken with twin-lens Rolleiflex cameras. The Rolleiflex camera's viewfinder is top-down, so it is held inconspicuously at hip height, looking down. Maier was able to capture fleeting moments and turned them into something extraordinary.

VIVIAN MAIER'S CAMERA HISTORY

Vivian Maier’s first camera was a modest Kodak Brownie box camera with one shutter speed, no aperture, and focus control. In 1952 she purchased her first Rolleiflex camera. Over the course of her career, she used Rolleiflex 3.5T, Rolleiflex 3.5F, Rolleiflex 2.8C, Rolleiflex Automat, and others. She later also used a Leica IIIc, an Ihagee Exakta, a Zeiss Contarex, and various other SLR cameras.

Maier used mostly Kodak Tri-X and Ektachrome film.

Rolleiflex Camera

It seems that, for Maier, the nanny’s life allowed her to be with people, but not of them. She actively cultivated her own unknowability, perhaps as a way to maintain this separateness. She never spoke of a desire to make a living as a photographer. In Chicago, where she lived for decades, she refused to give film processors and pawn shopkeepers her real name instead of handing out fake names everywhere. She demanded separate locks for her rooms in her employers’ houses and forbade anyone from ever entering her space. She didn’t mention family or old friends. She lied about where she was born, claiming France as her homeland (she was born in New York City), and spoke with a contrived Continental accent that no one could place. She dressed in an outdated style, like a Soviet factory worker from the 1950s. An acquaintance recalls asking Vivian what she did for a living. Her response: “I’m a sort of spy.”

Her archives of pictures, films, and voice recordings reveal a fascination with rape and murder, urban blight and the ravages of poverty, the brutality of the city stockyards, and political unrest.

There’s no disputing that Maier was peculiar and prickly and that her interests spanned the benign and the morbid. But she was neither a Mary Poppins nor a surrogate Mommie Dearest. The people who knew her described impenetrability that, even in retrospect, threatens the fantasy that people who choose to care for children are all hugs and rainbows.

Maier had neither money nor connections, but she had control over how she lived, what she looked at, and what she photographed.

Her photographs (see Chicago and Illinois photo album below) of the urban and suburban streets track the fluctuations of the economy, the growth of the city, the cycles of the seasons, the emotions in the faces of the children she cared for, the way her own body advanced through the years. She chose her job not because she especially loved children, but because of the life it enabled her to have, what it allowed her to see. She valued her freedom above all. Her art and profession have more in common than they may initially seem. She was a perpetual outsider, and she liked it that way. She moved among people but did not belong to any of them. She was close but not entangled. She could always walk away.

Maier spent the late fifties and sixties traveling and photographing the world alone. It seemed that, on those trips, Maier was the freest she had ever been and ever would be. That’s how she wanted to see herself. And she did.

Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on. —Vivian Dorothea Maier

She lived her final years in the Rogers Park community of Chicago and was unknown and impoverished. It was not until after her death in 2009 that her life’s work was accidentally discovered. Since then, her photographs have been exhibited throughout the world.

Her pictures help us to understand that Maier wasn't invisible except to us. She was looking at herself all along.

Vivian Dorothea Maier died on April 21, 2009, in Oak Park, Illinois. She was cremated and had her ashes scattered, Specifically by the Gensburg sons, likely in the Catherine Chevalier Woods in the Forest Preserves of Cook County, near Chicago's O'Hare Airport.