400 Block South Clark Street, Chicago
[400 Block South Clark Street, Chicago (ca.1890-1903) /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
While not on most, if any, architectural tours, this group of buildings comprise the last surviving cluster of what was once one of Chicago's most people-packed lodging house districts. A half-block stretch of structures built from around 1890 to the early 1900s, the upper floors of these nondescript looking facades gave shelter to hundreds of thousands of men (no women allowed) struggling to make a living in the big city.
[Otis Building, 416 S. Clark Street, Chicago (ca. 1890) /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
Located near several of the city's railroad terminals, Clark Street, from Van Buren to 12th, was lined with shops and saloons on the ground floor and lodging cubicles on the floors above. Men could rent a bed from 15 to 25 cents for the night, but if you were really down on your luck, a bed of sorts could be had in the dingy basement for 10 cents a night. Some owners actually provide accommodations that were relatively clean, although most were in it for a quick profit and clean sheets and bathroom facilities were in short supply. But, for the low-paid or no-paid worker, the lodging house was perhaps a little better than spending the night sleeping on the street, or in the local police district lock-up.
[Hotel Men Only, 426 S. Clark Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
The ground floor space at 426-28 S. Clark was once home to the Workingmen's Exchange, the "world's greatest barrel house." Owned by one of the Chicago's more notoriously infamous city council members Alderman Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, the saloon served more than 15,000 glasses of beer a day. With a bar 84 feet in length, and a room 150 feet long and 50 feet wide, Kenna could pack 'em in, and was said to have racked in over $100,000 in profit in 1903. Kenna's building included clusters of cubicled lodging beds on the floors above the saloon which brought the crafty city official even more income, on top of the money he also collected from various constituents and city employees for various services. Prohibition put Kenna out of the legal beer business in 1919, but his acquaintance Al Capone made sure that the Alderman was well taken care of as beer flowed throughout the city, prohibited or not.
Always considered a blight on the nearby thriving business and commercial district of Chicago's Loop, eventually the derelict lodging houses fell, one by one. And although the surrounding neighborhood would be unrecognizable to Hinky Dink and his beer swilling cohorts, two of the buildings still provide lodging-style housing - for "Men Only."
See a transformative building constructed across the street on the site of a former row of lodging houses at: Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago.
Posted by designslinger at 7/14/2011 2:32 AM 
Categories: Architecture, Urbanism, History
Tags: South Loop Chicago Loop
Categories: Architecture, Urbanism, History
Tags: South Loop Chicago Loop
I love the top picture! This is the Chicago I picture when I read stories by Nelson Algren and other Chicago writers! Thanks for posting!
Toni
(Queen of the Exclamation Point!)
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You're welcome! Great to hear from you! Hope you're having a good summer.
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I used to consider blocks like this a blight on downtown, but that was when there were seedy stretches like this were all over the South Loop, when the gloomy facade of the old LaSalle Street Station still loomed over Van Buren's all-night diners & pawn shops, State Street still had a bunch of sketchy dives and you could get a gristly, flame-broiled ribeye dinner at Ronny's Steakhouse under the Wabash El for $4.99. Actually, that wasn't that long ago, and if you went on Wednesday evenings during the year-long run of "Show Boat" at the Auditorium Theatre, you'd often spot the performers grabbing a fast dinner between the matinee & evening shows.
Cheap steak never tasted as good as it did at Ronny's on freezing winter nights when the hissing clouds of steam & that billowed up from Ronny's sooty grill froze on the joint's single pane windows.
These days, Ronny's is a parking lot, Little King Hamburgers farther north on Wabash is the garden at Rhapsody, and what I used to look at as seedy now looks like something worth preserving just as it is, warts & all. On this particular block, warts are what it's all about. Lewis Mumford once used the phrase "artfully arrested decay" to describe our over-processed modern foods, but I think that's just the approach that needs to be taken here. In medical terms, what this block needs is minimal intervention. Once an amazing piece of real Chicago history like this is gone, we'll never get it back. Not everything needs to be prettified. Save the Squalor!
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We'll have to wait and see how much longer this arrestingly decayed block survives before an intervening development come its way. Inevitably, someday, there will be some such project that comes to this block on South Clark, and hopefully it will be minimal, warts and all.
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