On November 13, 11th Ward alderman James Balcer introduced a City Council resolution calling for a hearing to consider renaming the Chicago Cultural Center.
According to the resolution, in February 1972, when the building was threatened with destruction and her husband, Mayor Richard J. Daley, had just appointed a committee to study its future, Sis made “a rare public comment.” She responded to a reporter’s question by saying that she was “for restoring and keeping all the beautiful buildings in Chicago.”
Sis Daley’s opinion may well have influenced her husband, who was already catching heat for the demolition of Louis Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building, which had begun a few months earlier.
The Chicago Public Library was established in 1872, after British citizens (including Queen Victoria) sent a care package of thousands of books to our famously burned-out town. The library collection was initially kept in a water tank on LaSalle Street, and then in a series of temporary quarters. In 1883 the City Council picked a plot of land, on Michigan Avenue between Washington and Randolph, as its future site. Then a small park, the plot was already historic—it had once been the home of early Chicago settler Jean Baptiste Beaubien. It was also contested: the state legislature gave a Civil War veterans’ group part of it as the site for a memorial hall. The dispute, which went to court, ended in an agreement that the building would be shared, split into one part library, one part Grand Army of the Republic War Memorial.
The Randolph Street entrance and staircase lead to an exquisite second-floor rotunda with a floor of glass block and mosaic tile, a delicate 40-foot-diameter dome, and towering doors opening to the majestic green-marble GAR Memorial Hall, embellished with the names of 30 Civil War battles. Its bejeweled twin, the Washington Street entrance, is made of white marble inlaid with predominantly green mosaics of glass, mother-of-pearl, and stone, set in patterns and text that consists of literary names and quotations. The glittering chips stud the walls and staircase leading to multiarched Preston Bradley Hall, where more marble and mosaic is crowned by the world’s largest Tiffany stained-glass dome.
Oddly enough, this very same suggestion—that the building be renamed in honor of Sis Daley—arose a few years later. And since she was alive then, and able to state her opinion to yet another journalist, we know exactly what she thought of it.
