5. Old South Water Street, about 1910

"South Water Street today is an economic waste; a burdensome charge on all the people; a drawback to Chicago's progress; obstructive to its prosperity, and a conflagration danger to the whole Loop district," a publication urging implementation of the Chicago Plan declared. "South Water Street is a physical misfit. If left as it is, it must forever remain dwarfed, destroying its own usefulness." "Imagine a

condition such as South Water Street is today, two blocks from the Grand Opera House in Paris—two blocks from Trafalgar Square in London—or next to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Yet South Water Street is only two blocks from the Chicago City Hall, and only a three-minute walk from the world's busiest retail shopping district."

(Wesley Bowman Studios and Robert Elmore.)

Courtesy Chicago Historical Society.)

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# Wacker Improvement

## 1. Proposed Riverfront Improvement along South Water Street, Drawn about 1920

The architectural firm of Bennett and Parsons retouched the previous photograph to illustrate the way the new South Water Street river front would look after it had

been remodeled, in line with the conditions of the Chicago Plan. A new Franklin- Orleans Bridge was called for, the river front was improved, and massive new public buildings were magically erected. Wacker Drive, named for the first chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, was completed in the spirit of this rendering. (Wesley Bowman Studios and Robert Elmore, Courtesy Chicago Historical Society.)

of a bursting metropolis. Moreover, the increasing use of motor trucks made even its central location obsolete. Yet South Water, for all its shortcomings, had its charm. "It was a cheery, chaotic, bartering street, often utterly jammed with wagons or traders," Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith remembered. "It blocked off bridgeheads. It slowed carlines. Pedestrians squeezed between wagon-wheels, stepped over planks laid from barrels." It was "a silly old street for a great city. Yet every one half loved it; and the traders loved it devotedly."

Sentiment for the old collided with

the enthusiasm and needs of the new. The *Plan of Chicago* called for monumental boulevards along both sides of the river, a dream which could not be realized as long as the market remained. As the city moved to implement the Burnham and Bennett scheme, the old occupants struggled for their historic location. "They want to stay where Nature put them, here on the old waterfront," one opponent of change contended; others raised the familiarament: "We were here first; we belong here and have no place to go." Ultimately, 8,000 property owners received

some compensation for the dislocation entailed. Within a few years, however, the value added to the land along Wacker Drive, estimated modestly at sixty-five million dollars, justified the change for most people.

The market was relocated about two miles to the southwest; and Wacker Drive, a double-decked ornamental street, was constructed along the river's edge. Newly located market facilities brought together rail and road traffic, and a series of three-story buildings provided modern installations. The completion of the new drive set off a con-

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## 2. New South Water Street, 1925

Removal of the produce market to its present location two miles from the center of the city eliminated sixteen per cent of the 150,000 daily vehicle trips into the loop. But only a few decades later the aging market was again slated for replacement. Obsolete design, congestion, and inadequate street access, as well as changes in methods of food distribution, made a more modern food center necessary, and by 1968 several alternative sites were under study.

(Photograph, Kaufmann and Fabry. Courtesy Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad.)

## 3. Wacker Drive between Michigan and Wabash Avenues, 1929

The original portion of Wacker Drive was completed by 1926, a physical testimony to men who pushed for it. "Its very location has destined it to be a modern, high-class business thoroughfare, the second finest in Chicago, and the logical northern boundary of the loop district," one publication stated in the early 1920's. "It is a two-level street," a Chicago school textbook added in 1930. "The upper one is 110 feet wide and is for general traffic. The lower is 135 feet wide and is used by

heavy commercial traffic. This level connects the warehouses and the industrial and terminal district on the west side with the boat and rail terminals and the industrial district east of Michigan Avenue. It emerges into the normal level of Market Street between Randolph and Lake streets." By 1929 modern buildings had already broken the skyline along the drive, most notably the 75 East Wacker Drive building (formerly Mather Tower).

(Courtesy Chicago Historical Society.)

## 4. View Eastward toward Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue, 1931

Samuel Merwin, writing in 1929, expressed a common opinion when he wrote of Wacker Drive: "This drive is, flatly, a new concept. For nearly a mile along the southerly bank of the many-times manhandled little river it curves its unbelievably lovely way, widening here and there into broader areas of pavement, edged with massive stone parapets. The South Water Street of my youth, where one picked his muddy way between crowding market wagons, has vanished. All the old brick buildings where the market men and the commission men once

held forth have gone. . . . They hadn't let anything stand in the way of Charles H. Wacker's dream." Amid all the improvements, the problem of the river remained: with the expansion of the Near North Side, traffic movements across the three bridges—at State, Wabash, and Michigan—increased proportionately. A traffic study completed in June of 1926 recorded 35,351 bridge openings during the previous twelve-month period. Each of these openings meant an average delay of a little over three minutes.

(Photograph, Kaufmann and Fabry. Courtesy Chicago Historical Society.)

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1. View Eastward along Main Stem of the Chicago River from over Wolf Point, 1965

Since the 1920's, many establishments have settled on prestigious, yet still central, locations within the city's major trade area. In the process, the River and the adjacent Wacker Drive have become a corridor which provides a panorama of the city's best architecture. One writer in 1965 went so far as to declare that the Drive was a fair representative of the character of the whole city. "Wacker Drive is like the city

itself—bold, spectacular, and unfinished. It is the youngest of all downtown thoroughfares, a strong-willed maverick that would rather run with the river than with its grid-harnessed brothers: a wall-to-water corridor, broad and fair, that angles through the city's heart; a double-deck wonder between the Near West and the Near North that speeds drivers along in four directions beyond the nerve tips of the Loop."

(Courtesy Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry.)

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