Hidden History of Old Town by Shirley Baugher

Author:Shirley Baugher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

LEO WEISSENBORN, 1877–1967

Just an Ordinary (Old Town) Man

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.

—Thomas Jefferson

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home.

—Henry Rowley Bishop, 1823

Who is Leo J. Weissenborn, you might wonder, and why should he be part of Old Town’s hidden history? If you try to Google him, and if you are very persistent, you will find a couple of things—namely, that he was born in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1877; that he moved to Old Town in 1886; that he was educated in Chicago; and that he went on to become a prominent architect, one of the designers responsible for the Chicago Tribune Tower and the addition housing the WGN radio station. He also designed the pedestal for the famous Nathan Hale statue located in the plaza north of the Tribune Tower. All of this is interesting but not necessarily enough to put him in the Old Town Hall of Fame.

Fortunately, we know a good deal more about Leo Weissenborn than the bare-bones information on Google. We know this because, at age seventy-eight, Leo wrote his recollections of an Old Town boyhood and left the unpublished manuscript to the Chicago History Museum. He later synopsized his musings for the 1955 Old Town Art Fair program book, which he called, Here Is Old Town Past. Both provide a firsthand account of Old Town life at the end of the nineteenth century and what it was like growing up there.

HUDSON AVENUE DAYS, 1886

The Weissenborn family moved to Old Town in 1886, when Leo was just nine years old. Their first address was 1933 North Hudson, near Wisconsin Street. From the day he arrived, young Leo was taken with his surroundings, so much so that they stayed with him during a very long and productive life. Let’s start with his earliest memories of the look of Old Town, circa 1886. He tells us that the streets were paved with cedar blocks and surfaced with tar and gravel—as were streets throughout Chicago at the time. Signs on the streetlamps identified his block as Church Street (which Hudson was called at that time). Looking down the block and across the way, there were some landmarks that stood out in the old man’s memory. Where Ogden Avenue intersected with North Clark Street, there was a distinctive, flat iron–shaped, three-story brick building bounded by Clark Street, Center Street (now Armitage Avenue) and Wisconsin. A Masonic Lodge Hall occupied the top floor of this building, where the Chicago Ethical Culture Society held its Sunday school classes. (The building has long since been torn down.)

That building led to Lincoln Park, which figured prominently in Weissenborn’s early years. Garfield Avenue (now called Dickens) was considered the main entry to Lincoln Park. Picture this—at this Garfield entry stood a bronze sphinx mounted on granite blocks, a gift of the map publisher Andrew McNally, who came to the neighborhood after the Great Fire. That sphinx was a prime target for Leo and his friends.

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