August 12 1927: Charles Lindbergh is in Chicago, three months after his triumphant flight from New York to Paris. The Chicago Tribune reports: “From 1:45 p.m. until 3 while Lindy swung the big winged monoplane three times around the Loop and as far north as Chicago avenue, the din of this city was for the man and his plane, but from then until 10 in the evening thousands cheered at sight of the man himself. . . .
This young, unknown alderman from the 29th Ward later became a powerhouse in the Democratic Party, no doubt because he knew exactly where and when to buy and sell favors. He was certainly not a progressive, according to 14th Ward Alderman Edward Burke. The honor of appearing on the dais at that once-in-a-lifetime banquet and presenting Chicago’s gift to the hugely popular national hero was undoubtedly worth a sturdy price. And why else would he have been given the honor?
“At the Stevens, as the guides pointed out last night, a guest is more than a guest. He can read a book to his liking among the 25,000 volumes. He can have his appendix removed, for there is a completely equipped two-ward hospital. He can run a convention in the large assembly hall or he can display a complete exhibit in the exposition rooms.”
In 1909 James W. Stevens, owner of the Illinois Life Insurance Company, had built the sixth large hotel in downtown Chicago, the Hotel LaSalle (since demolished). It was a serviceable, pleasant place intended for businessmen. Only the Drake, the Morrison, the Bismarck, the Blackstone, and the Palmer House were bigger. Albert Quarles, who was a stock boy at the LaSalle and now, at 79, is the retired head of the Hotel-Motel Association of Illinois, remembers the LaSalle well: “It was a nice hotel for its day. It had a bath between connecting rooms, like most hotels. It had 1,026 rooms and cost $5 million to build.” The hotel, in the midst of the business community on LaSalle Street, did very well.
Ernest Stevens took more than $1 million out of his insurance business to keep the ailing hotel going. But in 1931 he was accused, and later convicted, of embezzling that money from the publicly held insurance company. The prosecution claimed that “the hotel was actually insolvent and did not merit the loans of more than $1,000,000 granted it by the insurance company.” As part of Stevens’s battle, a court in 1931 valued the hotel at $15,134,180–and that included the land, of course. In 1933, the Chicago Daily News estimated that if the Stevens were torn down in 1959, “at the end of its normal economic life,” the land alone would be worth $6,427,000.
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Ernest’s son was John Paul Stevens, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975. Justice Stevens says that his father would sit at the breakfast table fondling one of the silver creamers from the hotel. Saying it was all he had left of his dream, he called it his “$27 million creamer.” When the hotel was renovated in 1984, its general manager at that time, William Smith, retrieved some of the original brass doorknobs and had them mounted. He sent one to Justice Stevens, who responded by telling the story of the silver creamer. He told Smith that he was grateful to have a doorknob now, too.
It was wartime, and many decisions were made that were sooner or later regretted. Of the 200 hotels in the country that the Army requisitioned in World War II, it purchased only the Stevens. But five months after the huge auction that had scattered the hotel’s equipment far and wide, and 13 months after the Army moved in, it abandoned the hotel. It was sold to the management of the Drake and Blackstone hotels for $5,251,000, only 16 years after it had been finished to the tune of $27 million.
