Court House

By the time of the fire the Court House had also added east and west wings, a brand-new clock, and a 10,849-pound bronze bell that for over five hours would ring out the alarm until it fell through the collapsing building.  It housed virtually all city and country offices, from the jail in its basement to the mayor’s quarters, the debtors’ prison, the city council, the board of public works, and the courtrooms on the upper floors.

The vertical wall fragment on the left, the pile of rubble in front, and the damage to the photograph itself all emphasize the extent of the devastation.  Note that the finials on top of the building have survived largely intact.  Several of these were salvaged, and one, now located just inside Lincoln Park north of Armitage, is another Landmark in this collection.

It did not take long for photographers to move from simply recording what had happened to aestheticizing the scene of destruction in carefully framed images like this.

After the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the Court House, the city administration established temporary quarters for a brief time in the First Congregational Church at Washington Street and Ann (now Racine) streets in the West Division before moving in 1872 to a building erected at the southeast corner of LaSalle and Adams street.  It would occupy these “temporary” quarters until 1885, when the monumental new City Hall and Cook County Courthouse seen here was completed in the same block as the one that had fallen before the flames.

The city and county sponsored an architectural competition in the early 1870s that attracted forty-nine entries.  Architectural historian Daniel Bluestone observes that most were contemporary variations on classical styles intended to “evoke permanence, success, a flourishing civilized life, a proper use for accumulated commercial wealth, and a confidence in the future.”  The Chicago City Council overruled its own building committee, Bluestone explains, in favor of architect J. J. Egan’s massive Second Empire design, which was overloaded with architectural detail and adorned with allegorical statuary.  When it was finally completed more than a decade later, this version of the Court House was more of a monument to the Gilded Age corruption and an uncertain economy than to the lofty values it was supposed to proclaim.  As the 1893 Rand, McNally Bird’s-Eye Views and Guide to Chicago commented, “Many political scandals and some litigation attended its construction.”

The building filled the entire block, eliminating the park-like setting that surrounded its predecessor.  It was for several years the home of the Chicago Public Library until that institution moved in 1897 to its own first permanent building, now the Chicago Cultural Center, a few blocks directly to the east on Michigan Avenue.