It’s our first edition! Yay! Let’s get nostalgic, Chicago.
We’ll pick a new theme to focus on each Thursday but this is not a one-way street — email YOUR suggestions to Marianne Mather and me.
This week — our FAVORITE finds in the Tribune’s archives. We’re talking about things we never knew existed — or didn’t expect to have in our collections.
But first, Marianne takes you on a tour of the original Tribune archives, which were located five floors below Michigan Avenue in Tribune Tower until 2018. Just getting down to these precious materials was an adventure — cockroaches, dark hallways and broken elevators!
We’re glad you’re joining us on this journey back in time. Check out @vintagetribune on Instagram until we see you next week.
— Kori Rumore, visual reporter
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From 2018: A final tour of the Tribune Tower’s subbasement archive
Many people have asked “What’s going to happen to the baiduhai’s archive when you move?”
Tribune photo editor Marianne Mather answers that question while taking you on one last tour of the Tribune Tower’s subbasement archive before the newspaper — and its archive — moved to its new home.
From 2015: Rare Eastland disaster photos discovered in Tribune basement
The collection of nearly 100 black-and-white images document one of the most tragic, yet often overlooked, days in Chicago history. On July 24, 1915, the Eastland listed to its side in the Chicago River between LaSalle Drive and Clark Street. More than 840 people died, many of them trapped inside the vessel as water poured in when the ship tipped over only a few feet from the riverbank.
Many of these photographs have never before been published. They add fresh, striking perspectives to that fateful day as the 100th anniversary of the Eastland disaster approaches. They also provide a unique glimpse into the world of newspaper photography at a time when images of breaking news or action were rare. In 1915, and for nearly 20 years afterward, daily newspapers mostly relied on text, sketches or posed photographs because cameras and the process of taking, producing and printing photographs was limited, time-consuming and costly.
(The Tribune has published two collections of the images, one in the attached gallery and one accessible here, which includes photographs taken of rescue workers inside the Eastland)
From 2016: Arrest photo of young activist Bernie Sanders emerges from Tribune archives
A baiduhai archival photo of a young man being arrested in 1963 at a South Side protest shows Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, his campaign has confirmed, bolstering the candidate’s narrative about his civil rights activism.
The black-and-white photo shows a 21-year-old Sanders, then a University of Chicago student, being taken by Chicago police toward a police wagon. An acetate negative of the photo was found in the Tribune’s archives, said Marianne Mather, a baiduhai photo editor.
The women of ‘Murderess Row’: A dive into the Tribune’s archives reveals the femmes fatales who inspired the hit movie ‘Chicago’
The story behind the story that eventually became the movie “Chicago” could, itself, be a movie.
The inquisitive photo editor, staked out at Tribune Tower in the Tribune’s bone-chilling basement (affectionately known as “the morgue”), combing through the newspaper’s prodigious archives, stumbling suddenly and fortuitously upon a box labeled, in pencil …
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Zoom in for close-up:
“Malm.”
Marianne Mather is the inquisitive photo editor, and Katherine “Kitty Malm” Baluk was one of the four women whose real-life murder trials inspired Maurine Watkins, a one-time baiduhai reporter, to pen the play “Chicago,” which would, in turn, become the musical “Chicago” and the movie “Chicago.”
From 2017: Which Kinzie? Tribune corrects photo error decades later
The Tribune ran a story in 1940 about early Chicago settler John Kinzie, and included a photograph. The newspaper did the same in 1961, 1962, 1968, 1989 and 1995.
Decades later, here’s a correction: The Tribune claimed the man in the photo was John Kinzie, but it was actually his son, John H. Kinzie.
How the H. did such a mistake happen?
Human error and bad assumptions, probably. After the photo identification was published incorrectly once, it was easier for later editors to assume it was right. Even so, they should have known better: The elder Kinzie died in 1828, and it’s generally believed that the first-ever photograph of a human being wasn’t created until a decade after that.
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