After failing in her attempts to visit the Art Institute, the new Chicago public library and Carson Pirie Scott`s State Street store, Janice Barton approached a police officer helping with Monday`s exodus from the Loop.
”Sir, I`m a visitor to this city,” began the San Antonio resident. ”Is this a normal thing?”
Many events that would be extraordinary elsewhere pass for everyday occurrences here. Monday`s subterranean flood in the heart of America`s third largest city was not one of them.
It was unusual because, except for a handful of janitors in building basements and those workers and onlookers who spent the day staring at twin whirlpools in the Chicago River, none of the hundreds of thousands affected by the Great Chicago Flood of 1992 ever saw any water.
It was unusual because one of the country`s densest urban areas, a domain of concrete and steel, was placed at the mercy of the forces of nature.
And it was unusual because an evacuation of the Loop-a business district that employs hundreds of thousands of people-proceeded in an orderly and sometimes even graceful fashion.
As the offices emptied, there was little sense of the alarm or panic usually associated with major disasters. Although there were some tense moments as office workers negotiated darkened high-rise stairways, and although bottom-line types at hundreds of businesses were moaning about lost productivity, more typical was the humor and even giddiness with which many greeted the unexpected holiday.
”I feel like a kid getting out of school because of snow,” said Mary Shannon, an Illinois Bell employee from Oak Park waiting for a midday train at the packed North Western station. ”This is great.”
A few restaurants dispensed free food rather than let it spoil in refrigerators that had no power because of the electrical blackout. Transit authorities gave free rides, albeit on crowded buses and trains, to the evacuees.
And in the basement of the Merchandise Mart, where flood waters were first spotted early Monday morning, building workers rescued a resident cat from the rising water.
In the lobby of the darkened Palmer House Hilton hotel, about 20 visiting Sears executives circled their chairs campfire-style around a pile of chemically luminescent yellow glow sticks, grown men and women gathered around children`s toys that the hotel kept on hand for just such an occasion.
”Do you have any hot dogs?” joked a voice from the darkness.
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In the Marquette Restaurant, 25 E. Washington St., a group therapy session, already booted from its usual setting, was interrupted by an order to evacuate the building. Asked if the order came at a critical moment, one of the patients said, ”When you`re in therapy, they`re all critical moments.”
In the 28-story building at 33 E. Monroe St., building officials conducted a leisurely, floor-by-floor evacuation of the 4,000 who work there. ”We might still have about 20 people up there,” operations manager Larry Hadfield said shortly after noon. ”But we`re clearing out all the pockets so that nine months from now we won`t have another baby boom.”
A woman whose condominium overlooks the Kinzie Street bridge, where the flooding was believed to have originated, watched the whole thing from her hot tub.
And Board of Trade workers who had endured the ”Black Monday” stock market crash of 1987 joked that April 13, 1992, would become known as ”Wet Monday.”
City officials may have spent the day scrambling to plug the hole in the Chicago River that allowed water to pour into a turn-of-the-century tunnel system, but to people forced to leave work early it was more like the 5 p.m. whistle had simply blown prematurely.
Fire Department officials, relying on the city`s emergency preparedness plan, contacted each building in the Loop, both in person and by phone, warning building managers that evacuation was recommended in an area bounded by Canal Street, Michigan Avenue, Taylor Street and the Chicago River. A smaller area within that quadrant was hit by the blackout, although there were scattered outages elsewhere.
The world`s tallest building, the Sears Tower, closed at about 12:45 p.m. Sears management informed its 5,000 workers via the company`s public address system, and building officials notified employers of the other 7,000 office workers in the tower by telephone.
”They were all in pretty good spirits,” said Dorreen Metzler, a guard in the 110-story building. ”They were all able to use the elevators.”
By 2 p.m., downtown streets were nearly deserted.
”It`s like the city got hit with a bomb,” said Fred Paul, a consultant from Des Plaines. ”I don`t think I`ve ever seen it like this.”
At 10 p.m., the Loop was lit only by bright lights mounted on emergency rescue vehicles that had been called in from surrounding communities.
Sharnette Brown and her two children, who had been visiting Brown`s sister, huddled on the corner of Dearborn and Madison streets, waiting for a bus.
”It looks like a ghost town down here,” Brown said.
People reached back into the litany of urban disasters, attempting to find something to compare with Monday. ”Compared to the 1967 snowstorm, this was a snap,” said Thomas White, a trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
Benjamin Mackoff, presiding judge of Cook County Circuit Court`s Domestic Relations Division, recalled that the only other time the Daley Center had been evacuated was due to a fire in the early 1970s. That time, Mackoff said, the chief judge was forced to walk down from the 26th floor because the power was out.
Monday`s flooding forced several hotels to transfer guests to other lodgings, but apparently none of the residential buildings in the Loop were hit by the blackout.
Most downtown workers said they were looking forward to at least one day off. But others had to move their business to temporary headquarters. One lawyer said she was bringing home about 20 pounds of paperwork to do on her kitchen table.
The flood also gave Loop denizens an extra workout. Jon Lichter of the downtown media management firm, Kelly, Scott & Addison, walked up and down 11 flights of stairs to retrieve some phone numbers and contract information. It wasn`t until after Lichter finished the walk that he realized the elevators were still operating.
In a 23rd floor courtroom of the Daley Center, Cook County Judge Lester Forman was hearing the home foreclosure case of a La Grange Park couple when he got the order to evacuate.
As a lawyer asked the judge for a continuance in the case at about 11:15 a.m., a clerk handed Forman a note, informing him that the building was to be emptied because Commonwealth Edison was expected to turn off power.
Forman quipped: ”Well, maybe you`re going to get your continuance.”
Turning to his court stenographer he added, ”You better put on your hip boots.”
But for all the uproar, some out-of-town visitors didn`t even notice that downtown Chicago was in the midst of one of the worst-if least visible-crises in its history.
Paige Wagner and Dan Reynolds, two of a group of art students visiting from Cincinnati, were ready to see the city`s sights until they realized the electricity in their hotel was shut off and downtown sidewalks were unusually empty for such a big city.
”It`s still more crowded than Cincinnati, so we really didn`t notice,”
Wagner said.
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