What's Below Chicago's Hole

For the better part of two decades, this abandoned site served as the only relic of what would have been the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. A $500 million gamble that the 2008 financial crisis turned into Chicago's most expensive piece of nothing. But here's the thing nobody talks about. The ground beneath it, around that hole, might be the single most historically significant patch of earth in the entire American Midwest. For every generation that touched it tried to build something bigger than the last. And the story of why reads like Chicago's biography. So how does a city that's reinvented itself more times than almost any other in the world end up with a hole at its most prized address? And what does that hole tell us about everything that came before it? Stay tuned to find out as we explore the history of Chicago's lakefront hole. I'm your host Ryan Socash and you're watching It's History. To understand why this particular patch of ground matters so much, we have to go back, way back, to before there was a city called Chicago at all. The history of who founded Chicago is highly contested, if not controversial in modern times. But as it just so happens, everything started at the north bank of the Chicago River. Modern accounts reference this area as the site where a fur trader, Jean Baptiste Pointe de Sable, please correct my pronunciation in the comments if you wish, established the settlement that became Chicago in 1790. And there is some credence to that idea. For example, in 1779, a British colonel recorded De Sable as living at the mouth of the river. Whereas in 1790, a war journal recorded that supplies were bought from De Sable's house. And perhaps most interesting is that in 1800, the De Sable homestead was sold to another trader from Quebec, Jean Le Lime, in the presence of witness John Kinsey for 6,000 lires. It's strange to consider that these guys were using European currency, but many of the traders were from the French-Canadian territory, and French culture and language were still defining the area. The bill of sale included the physical structure, but not the land itself. You see, around that time, the area was still the Northwest Territory, and there was no local municipal government in place, implying this sale was done under the order of a process called witness of standing, where a seller, buyer, and witness sign a deal in the presence of a notary, and then send a copy of that transaction to the nearest American office of the recorder of deeds, in this case, Wayne County, Detroit. With that in mind, it was actually a major stroke of luck that this particular document was sent out of state, because when the entire city burned down in the great fire of 71, it would have certainly been lost, and we wouldn't even have known this part of the story. Anyhow, De Sable was thought to have liquidated his estate in his 50s to spend out the rest of his days in Missouri, which was then still a part of Spanish Louisiana. Some accounts suggest that he was commissioned by a colonial governor to operate a ferry across the Missouri River, and spent the rest of his days with his children and grandchildren. Though this is quite speculative, and no one knows for sure where De Sable was laid to rest, some historians have even called the origin story largely fictitious. Still, one thing is for certain, at minimum, he was a part of the butterfly effect that became Chicago. In the meantime, the aforementioned John Kinsey was on the rise. He had political favor with local tribes, since his skills as a silversmith were highly coveted by those communities. Furthermore, he was hell-bent on dominating the region's fur trade, and by 1804, he managed to acquire the deed to the trading estate near the mouth of the Chicago River from Jean Boulin. So to summarize, the settlement was started by De Sable, bought by Jean, and then taken over by John. Many suspect there to have been shady aspects to this deal though, since the two men had such a strained relationship that in the years to follow, Lyme would shoot Kinsey in the shoulder, and in turn, Kinsey ended Lyme's life by stabbing him. From that point forward, Americans have passionately debated who was the town's true founding father. Though for the purpose of this video, my point in discussing it really boils down to the fact that regardless of who started that settlement, the settlement that became Chicago, the city's interests were always hyper-focused at the junction where the river met the lake. A place where canoe-based trade routes laid the path to the industrial-scale industries that would come a century later. By 1818, Illinois had become the 21st state in the Union. It had already enjoyed a healthy economic rise thanks to the natural waterways running deep throughout the interior plains. As far north as Hudson Bay, and as far south as New Orleans. So, as the fur trade evolved into the movement of things like textiles, alcohol, and salt, a new powerful connection was made possible east via the Erie Canal. This accomplishment made Chicago the heart of the young country in many ways. So, when the railroads arrived, the city was primed, and business along the waterfront exploded. As we've discussed in previous videos, grain was the primary commodity, and as stock traders artificially manipulated prices by hoarding the supply, what many refer to as Chicago's first skyscrapers, grain silos, rose along the riverfront. To accommodate further growth, then-Mayor William B. Ogden worked with his lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, to establish the Chicago Dock and Canal Company. That same year, the entire 40 acres of riverfront, including the area now known as DeSalvo Park, was acquired by the new company. By mid-century, they dug out the Ogden Slip to allow cargo ships to transfer freight directly to trains. By the turn of the century, rail lines ran on both sides of the waterway, with the Illinois Central Depot on the south, and the Wells Depot to the north. And Chicago was also working on its appearance, as the area had been somewhat beautified for the World's Columbian Exposition, an event where the engineering marvel, known as the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse, was unveiled. And it should be noted that this was only the beginning. Chicago was planning a massive transformation. By now, the local elite had amassed unimaginable wealth and power, and so they were considering how to symbolically transform Chicago's image. Hence, the Commercial Club of Chicago commissioned Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett to craft the Plan of Chicago. This document's key principles revolve around reorganizing the industrial harbor infrastructure, making the lakefront publicly accessible, and resolving the chaotic reality of rail yards and residential areas intertwined. In other words, these guys sought to create the New London or New Vienna. The plan verges on being utopian. It depicts the area around the Ogden Slip Indeed, the new concept was radically different from the reality of train yards, smoke, and ship congestion, and many believed it wasn't possible. Although some aspects of this plan were realized in the years to follow, they couldn't pull everything off. Historic maps from 1920 suggest that the jetty near the Ogden Slip was still a gritty place. It had a motor coach line, and old aerial photos show a variety of industrial buildings on the land there. Meanwhile, the North Pier was the Pew Terminal, a structure of almost incomprehensible scale for its time. This facility was 120 feet wide, 1,380 feet long, and seven stories tall. It contained a total of 23 acres of floor space beneath a single roof, making it, at the time, the largest building of its kind in the world. And not unlike that old trading post DeSable established in the same area centuries prior, its genius laid in its physical position. Sitting at the junction of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, this warehouse threaded the city's underground freight loop and surface lines simultaneously. What's more, the terminal was built at the precise point where the water and rail met. So, in practice, steamers arrived from Lake Michigan, as trains pulled in from the prairie lands beyond, and both discharged their cargo directly into the building without interruption. With that, James A. Pew had built more than a warehouse. He had built a system, one that reached from farm fields to the consumer's door, eliminating every middleman in between. And although city planners had continued to beautify the lakefront with more regal features, such as the ballroom at Municipal Pier, now known as Navy Pier, they were still far from the vision that the plan of Chicago had called for. Let's face it, the city wasn't pretty. You had freight trains rumbling through downtown, smokestacks polluting the waterfront, and ships clogging up every waterway in the area. And that was a problem, since the elite class wanted to present their home as a status symbol to the rest of the world. To do that, they needed culture. Though the irony here is priceless, since these were often the owners of the very same companies that blocked the plan's implementation. You see, there was one fact that they just couldn't avoid. For better or worse, Chicago, from its first documented settler, was economically centered on where the river met the lake. But as any Chicagoan now knows, that would not remain the case forever. Daniel Burnham would be realized when two things aligned. The rise of trucking, and later, gentrification. Merchandise Mart was built in 1930, and it absorbed the wholesale exhibition function entirely. With that, Kew Terminal was demoted to a pure warehousing role almost overnight. Its highest commercial purpose had already been stripped away before mid-century. Then, the state authorized a deepwater port at Lake Calumet, 20 miles south of the city center, effectively putting warehouses along the slip and along the riverfront out of business. At the same time, rail freight declined as trucking offered more flexibility and lower overhead. And since freight tracks were not desirable in the lens of the grand plan, the city itself pushed to accelerate this transition. So, by the 1960s, infrastructure had changed, and the Ogden Slip area, as well as the Inner Harbor, were caught in prolonged decline. The freight that had once justified infrastructure there was gone or on its way out. Buildings were aging, underutilized, and expensive to maintain. And thus, without any active commercial purpose, major urban decay set in. After just a few years of this blight, the first major step towards gentrifying the district occurred with the construction of Lake Point Tower. With Navy Pier at its east, Jane Addams Memorial Park to its north, and the then-soon-to-rise River District to the west, developers saw what almost no one else could. They recognized that the gritty industrial lakefront would one day become some of the most coveted real estate in the world. And so, in 1965, they rolled the dice, and construction began on one of the tallest apartment buildings in the world back then. Before and after photos of the building's site suggest that nothing major was demolished to make way. However, many industrial buildings in the vicinity were eventually lost to the road ramps of Lakeshore Drive. Curiously, during construction, the building served a dual purpose, as a striking residential skyscraper and as a giant real-world testing station for structural engineering. Instruments embedded throughout the building and a seismograph mounted at the tower's top would measure how the structure responded to wind, whether it swayed under gusts or steady pressure, and how quickly it rebounded. The goal wasn't to verify safety, but to confirm, in the real world, what engineers could previously only theorize in a lab. These results mattered, because its three curved Y-shaped wings, designed to withstand the extreme winds of Lake Michigan, later served as inspiration for the Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world. Completed in 1968, Lake Point Tower is 645 feet tall, has 900 units, parking for 700 cars, penthouse, and views unlike anything else in Chicago. Now, although it doesn't seem like a big deal from today's perspective, this tower has had a powerful impact on defining Chicago as a global city, and deserves some recognition. Over the years, some major American public figures have called the tower home. For starters, it was basically endorsed by the celebrity class. From the very beginning, Dolly Parton and Tom Selleck were known to stay there during their visits to Chicago. In the 1980s, Ellis Cooper lived there while stepping away from LA. Apparently, he remarked that half of the Chicago Cubs also lived in the building at the time. A claim which, if true, is also a powerful cultural notion for Chicagoans from the northern part of the city. But the list goes on. Athletes like Scottie Pippen and Sammy Sosa were reported to own units in the building. And finally, Tom Cruise was also spotted there somewhat frequently as well. This celebrity status matters to a city's broader perception, especially when it becomes amplified by the media. Case in point, Hollywood productions began to feature the tower films. From exterior shots in 86's Raw Deal featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Sandra Bullock's appearance in While You Were Sleeping, and of course, there was Meet the Parents at the turn of the 21st century. So why does this even matter? Well, for all their faults, high-status media figures and celebrities are used to craft the public perception. You consume big names as entertainment, but in the end, it's mostly marketing. It's influence. It works. Anecdotally here, my own mother would take me urban exploring around that abandoned Lakeshore Drive in the early 1990s, which might also reveal to you where I developed my type of curiosities, but that's beyond the point. I specifically remember her saying, Ryan, this area around Navy Pier was always considered to be seedy. Like it's the type of place that you weren't supposed to visit, but now it's in the movies. And I don't think she was the only one who had that impression. By 1985, a new master plan called for City Front Center to be developed along 50 acres of decaying industrial and port facilities. As for the Pew Terminal, that building was renovated between 88 and 89, and it was converted into a retail center office complex, which was called North Pier, offering restaurants, shops where steamers and freight trains had once discharged cargo directly into the building. Though the retail experiment failed when Navy Pier was massively redeveloped in 95, drawing foot traffic away and fierce competition. Even so, step by step, the entire area transformed into a place for the public, the type of place where tourists flocked. And so I might even go as far as saying that this is the type of place that Daniel Burnham imagined when crafting his plan. Bringing us back to the topic of that bizarre looking circular hole. In the new millennium, Chicago was ready to take the lakefront gentrification process to an entirely new level by doing what it's always done best, reclaiming the title of the world's tallest building. In this case, the Chicago Spire. Proposed in 2005 by Irish developer Garrett Byrne and later taken over by Santiago Calatrava, one of the world's most celebrated architects, the tower was designed to rise 2,000 feet into the sky. This twisting, tapering, drill bit design would have made the Spire one of the most recognizable structures on Earth, which perhaps would have been a poetic conclusion to everything that came before it. De Sable had recognized the value of that bend in the shore of its trading post. Pew had industrialized it into the largest warehouse on the planet, whereas the developers of Lake Point Tower had gambled on it when no one else would. And now it was to be crowned with something that would have even made Burnham pause. And so ground was broken in 2007. As the caissons went in, it seemed like Chicago's next chapter was upon us. But then a financial crisis hit. Construction stopped almost immediately, and it never resumed. The developers just walked away. And although the city pursued legal remedies, years passed and the foundation slowly filled in with groundwater. The hole itself was roughly 110 feet deep, 75 feet across, for nearly two decades served as an almost symbolic throwback to what the area once was, blighted. The hole was eventually filled in in 2023, and the site was redeveloped into a less sensational residential complex. So that's the story of Chicago's lost Spire hole. I really hope you liked it. And if you want to take a deeper dive into many of the other locations discussed today, don't forget to check out our Chicago history playlist by clicking right here. Also, if you've got an episode idea, please let me know in the comments section below, or feel free to commission your own episode by joining our members community. I'll check that about once a month and we'll see where it goes. Otherwise, as always, this is Ryan Silcash, signing off.