Forgotten Chicago: Examining Vintage Postcards

  The Congress Hotel at 520 S. Michigan is "one of the most beautiful hotels in the middle west," according to this postcard. Published by the Aero Distributing Co., Chicago. The Congress Plaza Hotel at 520 S. Michigan Avenue is one of Chicago’s oldest and largest hotels. It was also one of the tallest buildings in Chicago for a time. With over 800 hotel rooms and so many people coming and going over the years, the Congress Plaza has seen its share of accidents, drug overdoses, murders, and suicides, earning it the distinction of being the most haunted hotel in the city. The Congress Plaza Hotel was built in 1893 to house visitors to the World’s Columbian Exhibition. In the 1920s, mobster Al Capone was known to play cards on Friday nights in a meeting room at the hotel. According to the Choose Chicago website, Capone also had a private suite on the hotel’s eighth floor. Some say that ghosts of the victims of the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which was believed to be or...

A Chinese-American restaurant in Chinatown. This postcard is provided by the Chicago History in Postcards website.  In the early 1900s, Chinese restaurants in Chicago became the target of various attempted restrictions. “Chop suey houses,” as they were often called, were seen as problematic for several reasons: they were usually owned by non-citizens, they were thought to lower property values, and some even thought that they corrupted America’s youth. This effort to limit the operation of Chinese restaurants was also part of the larger anti-immigrant sentiment of the time.  A crowd at the King Joy Lo restaurant on Randolph Street. This postcard is provided by the Chicago History in Postcards website. The first wave of Chinese immigrants came to the U.S. in the mid-1800s during the Gold Rush. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred all Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. except for students, teachers, diplomats, and merchants. When the federal court decided that restau...

High waves at the Jackson Park shoreline. Published by V.O. Hammon Publishing Co., Chicago. What started out as a nice day to go fishing turned deadly for eight people on the lakefront on June 26, 1954. Suddenly and without warning, an eight-foot swell of water pulled seven fishermen into the lake at Montrose Harbor. The other fisherman was pulled into the water at North Avenue beach.  The bodies of the eight fishermen were found within a few days. A large group of fishermen on a pier. Published by V.O. Hammon Publishing Co., Chicago. The incident was called an “act of God” by some media agencies at the time. Experts, however, believed it was a seiche wave (pronounced “sayshe” or “seech”), which can occur when a storm squall line creates high winds and driving water across the lake and then back to the Chicago shoreline. The wave can range from a swell of just a few inches to a large wall of water so big that it can smash onto Lake Shore Drive. Seiche waves can occur on smaller...