Elegant and slightly mysterious, the bridge-tender towers that have stood sentinel alongside the Chicago River’s drawbridges for nearly a century often tickle the fancy of Chicagoans and tourists who wonder what it’s like inside.
Beginning Saturday, one of the most beautiful and celebrated of them all will open permanently to the public as a vest-pocket history museum that tells the story of Chicago’s relationship with the river.
Officially known as the McCormick Tribune Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum, the $950,000 facility will be housed inside the striking, 86-year-old Beaux Arts-styled bridgehouse on the southwest corner of the Michigan Avenue Bridge.
Because the museum’s content is modest, the real draw may be the chance to see the bridgehouse itself. Looking out from bridgehouse windows, visitors will be treated to dramatic scenes of the river, the city and the bridge that few but bridge tenders have seen before.
With five tiny floors accessed by a single, narrow metal staircase akin to those in lighthouses, the building has only 1,613 square feet of usable floor space, including an entryway and a viewing platform.
For that reason, the museum may have trouble accommodating all the people who want to get in, as the Chicago Fire Department has ordered that only 34 visitors may be inside it at a time. Projecting that people will stay about a half an hour, officials believe the museum can handle roughly 510 visitors a day.
If admission lines repeatedly grow long, administrators will consider selling timed tickets, said Margaret Frisbie, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, an environmental group operating the museum. Because of the stairs used throughout the small building, the museum will not be accessible to the handicapped.
The viewing platform overlooks the giant gears that raise the bridge for ships and sailboats too tall to pass under the bridge when it’s closed. The system is a mechanical marvel, so delicately balanced that it uses only a small, 140-horsepower electric motor to lift the 4,000-ton roadway.
“Bascule is the French word for `teeter-totter,’ and that is what this bridge is, essentially,” said Brian Steele, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation. “The bridge leaves that carry traffic are balanced on the other side of a trunnion–an axle–with giant counterweights, and it takes only a small horsepower motor to turn it up or lower it down.
“It is so sensitive that it has to be rebalanced each time that it gets a new coat of paint and in the winter with accumulation of salt or snow during a storm.”
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The story of the river begins at the lowest level of the tower, starting with the days when it was just a prairie stream dribbling into Lake Michigan before the first European explorers came through.
As soon as he saw the site in 1673, explorer Louis Jolliet saw the potential of cutting a canal between the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, enabling boats to travel from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico.
The next four floors tell how Jolliet’s vision was prophetic. Chicago saw explosive growth after the U.S. built Ft. Dearborn in 1803, less than 2 feet from where the bridgehouse now stands. By 1890, more than a million people lived here, thanks to the strategic location.
“The museum is designed to celebrate the natural river and the commercial development of the stream, which became the central feature to Chicago’s phenomenal growth as a city,” Frisbie said.
Before the bridge was built in 1920, Michigan Avenue ran only as far north as the river. An old swing bridge linked it to Rush Street on the north bank, and what is now North Michigan Avenue was then Pine Street. Both banks of the river were lined with wharves, warehouses and industrial plants.
Daniel H. Burnham, as part of his 1909 “Plan of Chicago,” co-authored with architect Edward H. Bennett, wanted to extend the grandeur of the Loop and South Michigan Avenue north of the river by building a magnificent bridge to Pine Street.
Bennett himself designed the magnificent, neo-classical limestone bridgehouses, each adorned with a bas-relief historical sculpture. Only two were needed to operate the bridge, but the city built four as a matter of aesthetic balance.
“Decorative features and sculpture must be provided to make the Chicago River attractive like European watercourses, and an object of beauty instead of ugliness,” said Charles Wacker, chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission in 1921.
“This treatment of public thoroughfares will … have a decisive influence on the character of the buildings along Michigan Avenue from Randolph Street to Chicago Avenue.”
In the days when great office towers like the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower began rising as North Michigan Avenue opened up, the bridge spans were raised more than 3,000 times a year for shipping.
Until the 1970s, tenders staffed the bridges 24 hours a day. Now, the bridges are opened only a few dozen times a year to let recreational sailboats with soaring masts pass between their summer and winter berths. Those openings are tightly scheduled, and three tender crews leapfrog one another to operate the bridges ahead of the boat procession.
The tower the museum occupies was purely a decorative structure from the first, as is the bridge’s northeast tower. The controls for running the bridge are in the northwest and southeast towers; the others were used occasionally for storage.
The Michigan Avenue bridge towers weren’t the first, as several others went up even earlier, including more Beaux-Arts beauties on LaSalle Street.
In the late 1990s, the city for a couple of years used the southeast bridgehouse at State Street to house a gallery, though only in the lower part of the structure. There was no public access above the sidewalk level.
The McCormick Tribune Foundation, the major donor behind the formation of the new museum, is named for longtime Tribune publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick, a great supporter of the Chicago River. As president of the Chicago Sanitary District and alderman in the early part of the 20th Century, McCormick participated in early efforts to clean up the river.
“The River Museum has a great tie to the history of our foundation,” said Don Cooke, the foundation’s executive vice president. “It tells a very important Chicago story, so it is important for the foundation to be a part of it.”
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If you go
What: McCormick Tribune Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum.
Where: 376 N. Michigan Ave., at the Chicago River. The entrance is at the bottom of stairs leading to the river from Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive.
When: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily, through autumn.
Admission: $3 suggested.
Information: 312-977-0227 or www.bridgehousemuseum.org.
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