A Shoppers' Paradise by Emily Remus

Author:Emily Remus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

For the unescorted woman, Van Buren Street, where the Levee met the business district, marked the “boundary line between decency and indecency.”74 Above Van Buren, retail stores, offices, banks, restaurants, grand hotels, and theaters competed for space in sleek new skyscrapers. Below Van Buren, dilapidated wooden buildings sheltered the industry of vice that had made the district famous. Since the 1870s, these two commercial spheres had operated side by side. But as the city prospered and demand for real estate grew, the business district strained against the Levee’s northern border. The problem was vividly illustrated in a May 1901 Chicago Tribune photograph in which steel-framed high-rises stood opposite “old dives” (fig. 5.3).75 As one real estate expert commented at the time, “The congestion at the central part of the city, the low prices prevailing outside of the older business district, and other things tempt the investor to cross over the line and build in what had been disreputable territory.”76

The crunch for real estate was especially acute on State Street, where retailers paid top dollar for space on Chicago’s preeminent shopping corridor. With inventory on the northern blocks of State Street evaporating, merchants and investors began to eye the rundown lots south of Van Buren, known as “Whisky Row.” This strip harbored a nearly unbroken line of cheap saloons that spanned the full length of the Levee. As Mayor Carter Harrison Jr., son of the previous Mayor Harrison, recalled in his autobiography, Whisky Row then “duplicated a wild and wooly frontier town of cowboy days.”77 Prostitution and gambling were conducted openly, even flagrantly, along this street. “The conditions which exist elsewhere are to be observed here in an exaggerated degree,” affirmed a 1901 Chicago Record-Herald editorial. “The ‘joints’ are strung along one after another, they thrust themselves upon the attention of the people, and … they keep up a perennial parade of vice and disorder.”78

The first attempt to annex part of Whisky Row to the business district had occurred a decade earlier, amid the construction boom of the World’s Fair. In 1892, Siegel-Cooper & Co. initiated the movement south by opening a grand new store at the southeast corner of Van Buren and State Streets.79 Built by Levi Leiter, a former partner of Marshall Field, the block-long building stood eight stories high and contained a massive 553,500 square feet of floor space. When construction began in 1889, many Chicagoans doubted Leiter would find a tenant willing to locate so far south.80 “His temerity,” critics insisted, was “greater than his judgement.”81 As soon as news broke, however, that Siegel-Cooper had leased the space, Leiter was heralded as a visionary who had dared to reimagine the traditional boundaries of the business district.82 When the store finally opened in March 1892, the Inter Ocean declared that “the retail trade center of Chicago had been moved south.”83

Figure 5.2 The nightly scene in Chicago’s red-light district, known as the Levee, is depicted in this 1901 illustration from an account published by former police detective Clifton R. Wooldridge.

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