I dug up a little bit more house history today. Searching the Chicago Tribune archives specifically for our address, I found out that a Philip L. Butler lived here in the fifties. Whether he was the owner or a tenant, I don't know. But here's the info from the obituary section:
Butler--Marion Elizabeth Butler of the Ridgeview Hotel, E--, Ill., formerly of Morristown, N.J., July 15, 1955, mother of Philip L. Butler, 1XXX Monroe Street...
In the late forties /early fifties the Wintons lived here. A May 12, 1949 article on local golf caddies earning scholarships had this: "Glen Winton, 1XXX Monroe st., E--, Westmoreland, chemical engineering." Westmoreland is a country club founded in 1911 when a group of men from the local golf club grew dissatisfied with the space limitation for their own course. It's name literally comes from their move "West for More Land."
A May 4, 1950 article with the headline "Catholic High Schools Name Star Seniors" mentioned that a James Winton of 1XXX Monroe was named to the National Honor Society and also was a member of the golf team at St. George High School. St. George was an all-boys school located at 350 Sherman Avenue that opened in 1927 and closed in 1969.
So, that's about all I dug up searching for The Box House address in the Trib archives. Searching for the last name of the most recent previous owners in the archives provided a few leads regarding where the family used to live, etc., but nothing about their time in our house.
Doesn't sound like much, does it? But searching for information on our condo address, that's another story.
Prior to the construction of our six-flat building in 2002, a turn-of-the-century frame house existed. And in 1977, it was the site of a grisly murder:
"Criminal Court Judge William Cousins, Jr. sentenced a man to 60 to 70 years in prison Wednesday for what he called the 'hideous' burglary and muder of a 79-year-old woman.
'This crime is one of the most grisly than can be imagined,' Cousins said in sentencing Leon Blackwell, who was convicted last month of the murder of Agnes Bookham in her home at 4XXX N. Winthrop Av.
Court observers said it was the harshest sentence ever handed down by Cousins, a former liberal alderman from the 8th Ward who took the bench last December...
Blackwell, 34, of 4329 W. Washington St., stood motionless as the judge handed down the sentence...
According to testimony presented at the three-day jury trial, Blackwell and two accomplices entered Miss Bookham's home June 4, 1975, to steal money for narcotics. They bound the victim's hands and feet, sexually assaulted her, then wrapped masking tape around her head until, in the words of prosecutor Howard Schaffner, 'she looked like a mummy.' Doctors testified the woman died of suffocation..."
There is nothing left of Agnes Bookham's house or garage; everything was torn down to make way for the condo building. But it makes me sad nonetheless that such a horrible thing happened where we used to live.
02 January, 2009
Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1899, 1920, 1946
Even though I no longer live in Chicago, my library card is still good. This allows me online access to some of the databases at the Chicago Public Library, including the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Illinois. These maps were originally created to assess fire insurance liability in urbanized areas. The oldest maps date to just after the Civil War, and roughly 12,000 towns and cities across the U.S. were covered between 1867 to 1970. The Sanborn Maps are an excellent resource for researching urban geography, as the company's cartographers mapped out everything. Individual volumes might include an "index of streets and addresses, a ‘specials’ index with the names of churches, schools, businesses etc., and a master index indicating the entirety of the mapped area and the sheet numbers for each large-scale map (usually depicting four to six blocks) and general information such as population, economy and prevailing wind direction. The maps include outlines of each building and outbuilding, the location of windows and doors, street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries, fire walls, natural features (rivers, canals, etc), railroad corridors, building use (sometimes even particular room uses), house and block number, as well as the composition of building materials including the framing, flooring, and roofing materials, the strength of the local fire department, indications of sprinkler systems, locations of fire hydrants, location of water and gas mains and even the names of most public buildings, churches and companies."
Across the Street from The Box House, 1899
I was able to check our neighborhood in three different volumes. The 1899 map showed that some of the streets in my neighborhood existed back then, but ours did not. There are a few farmhouse-style buildings marked out, including the Twin Yellow Houses we considered making an offer on, which were once owned by the town's first black doctor (according to the current owner). There were a few parcels of land marked out into lots for future development, but most of it looks like farmland or open land with a few greenhouses, including the Weiland-Risch Floral Company just to the south (of our present location) and the Nicholas Welter Florist and Pete Schumer Florist just to the west. If The Box House existed then, we'd be able to look out from our living room windows at the greenhouses across the street.
Our exact neck of the woods is not mapped, although everything around it is, which leads me to think it was completely undeveloped land.
Portion of Evanston, 1920
The 1920 map of the neighborhood, a portion of which is shown above, shows that most of the land has now been divided into individual parcels, although nothing has been developed on them yet. The land is marked as Kinsella's Addition and Welter's Ridge Addition; I'll have to see if those are the names of the actual developments or just a way to designated who sold the land for development. Based on this, it seems our parcel may have been owned by the same family who owned the Welter greenhouses. At any rate, with the exception of one lone house on the far end of the block, there were no other houses on my street prior to 1920. The street is marked, and the alleys are now marked, but there are no houses yet. The Nicholas Welter Greenhouse still existed, along with a Mat Welter Greenhouse just beside it. The Pete Schumer Florist Greenhouse has become the Schumer Florist Company Greenhouse, and there are a fair number of other greenhouses in the immediate vicinity that didn't appear on the 1899 map. In addition to all these glass buildings, The Box House (if it had existed in 1920) would have looked out onto a few wagon sheds.
Portion of Evanston, 1946
The Sanborn Map from 1946 is vastly different. Nearly every lot on my street is developed, and The Box House and its garage are clearly marked as part of the Welter's Ridge Addition. The land to the west is still mostly undeveloped, as far as housing. So up until World War II, at least, the residents of The Box House would have been looking out their living room window at the one greenhouse left, which looks like it was called Jack Clusen Greenhouse. Here's a closeup of our house on the Sanborn Map:
The Box House, 1946
Across the Street from The Box House, 1899
I was able to check our neighborhood in three different volumes. The 1899 map showed that some of the streets in my neighborhood existed back then, but ours did not. There are a few farmhouse-style buildings marked out, including the Twin Yellow Houses we considered making an offer on, which were once owned by the town's first black doctor (according to the current owner). There were a few parcels of land marked out into lots for future development, but most of it looks like farmland or open land with a few greenhouses, including the Weiland-Risch Floral Company just to the south (of our present location) and the Nicholas Welter Florist and Pete Schumer Florist just to the west. If The Box House existed then, we'd be able to look out from our living room windows at the greenhouses across the street.
Our exact neck of the woods is not mapped, although everything around it is, which leads me to think it was completely undeveloped land.
Portion of Evanston, 1920
Portion of Evanston, 1946The Sanborn Map from 1946 is vastly different. Nearly every lot on my street is developed, and The Box House and its garage are clearly marked as part of the Welter's Ridge Addition. The land to the west is still mostly undeveloped, as far as housing. So up until World War II, at least, the residents of The Box House would have been looking out their living room window at the one greenhouse left, which looks like it was called Jack Clusen Greenhouse. Here's a closeup of our house on the Sanborn Map:
The Box House, 1946It doesn't tell us much that we don't already know. The "D" stands for "dwelling" and "2B" means two-story brick (or two-story plus basement). The "A" on the garage indicates it is a private garage. The slashed lines on the house show that there were window openings on the first and second floors. I think it's saying that the house is 45 feet tall? I'll have to measure it sometime, that doesn't sound right. The porches are frame, and by 1946 were enclosed. I can't discern what the other symbols mean, and I don't know what the slashed lines on the garage indicate. I thought the black dots might be doors, but they're not positioned correctly.
Nowadays, the greenhouses are gone and it's solid dwelling units--single family homes, town homes, apartment buildings--for blocks all around us. But it is interesting to see how the immediate area changed in a little over a hundred years.
Nowadays, the greenhouses are gone and it's solid dwelling units--single family homes, town homes, apartment buildings--for blocks all around us. But it is interesting to see how the immediate area changed in a little over a hundred years.
01 January, 2009
Deconstructing Our Workbench and a Bit o' Cream of Wheat
One of the things we inherited with The Box House was a monstrously huge, very heavy workbench.
It was in the room we call Uncle Jimmy's tool room, now my office, which is located at the far, far end of the basement. We hauled this puppy the full length of the basement, up the stairs, and into the garage. I'm stronger than I look, but even so, it was not an easy task.
We decided we already had enough workbenches, in the garage and in the house, and didn't really need or want this one. It looked like it was cobbled together from miscellaneous scraps of this and that. It's not the kind of thing that we thought would go on Craig's List, either. So we decided to take it apart and salvage what wood we could. But something made me wipe down one of the boards, thick with coal dust and decades worth of grit, and look! It's from an old Cream-of-Wheat shipping crate!
Now, I love a good bowl of cream o' wheat. It's one of the two foods my mother could get me to eat when I was sick (the other being creamed eggs on toast, which she'll still make for me when I have the flu). When I was in college, and poorer than I am now, a box of quick-cooking Cream of Wheat could last me for weeks. I'd have it every day for breakfast, with a pinch of salt and a dollop of butter. So you can imagine how excited I was to find this. The script on this board is rather old-fashioned, and I tried a Google search to see if I can date it based on the logo, but no luck. I assume it belonged to the previous previous owner.
There were other boards for Quaker Oats.
The boards all cleaned up fairly well, and I'll be putting hooks on them to hang up in the garage and/or my office. The rest of the wood made it to a scrap pile in the corner. Not sure what we'll do with it, yet, but we'll figure out something.
It was in the room we call Uncle Jimmy's tool room, now my office, which is located at the far, far end of the basement. We hauled this puppy the full length of the basement, up the stairs, and into the garage. I'm stronger than I look, but even so, it was not an easy task.We decided we already had enough workbenches, in the garage and in the house, and didn't really need or want this one. It looked like it was cobbled together from miscellaneous scraps of this and that. It's not the kind of thing that we thought would go on Craig's List, either. So we decided to take it apart and salvage what wood we could. But something made me wipe down one of the boards, thick with coal dust and decades worth of grit, and look! It's from an old Cream-of-Wheat shipping crate!
Now, I love a good bowl of cream o' wheat. It's one of the two foods my mother could get me to eat when I was sick (the other being creamed eggs on toast, which she'll still make for me when I have the flu). When I was in college, and poorer than I am now, a box of quick-cooking Cream of Wheat could last me for weeks. I'd have it every day for breakfast, with a pinch of salt and a dollop of butter. So you can imagine how excited I was to find this. The script on this board is rather old-fashioned, and I tried a Google search to see if I can date it based on the logo, but no luck. I assume it belonged to the previous previous owner.There were other boards for Quaker Oats.
The boards all cleaned up fairly well, and I'll be putting hooks on them to hang up in the garage and/or my office. The rest of the wood made it to a scrap pile in the corner. Not sure what we'll do with it, yet, but we'll figure out something.
Maggie and Seamus, BFF
People let me tell you 'bout my best friend,
He's a warm-hearted person who'll love me till the end.
People let me tell you 'bout my best friend,
He's a one boy cuddly toy, my up, my down, my pride and joy.
People let me tell you 'bout him, he's so much fun
Whether we're talkin' man to man or whether we're talking son to son.
Cause he's my best friend.
Yes he's my best friend...
La la, la la la la, la la...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)