In the late 1950s, Frank Sinatra sang the praises of Chicago’s premier shopping and entertainment destination:
“On State Street, that great street, I just want to say
They do things they don’t do on Broadway!”
But by the early 1970s the reality was that fewer people were doing anything on State Street. Chicago’s business and civic leaders decided the once thriving retail strip desperately needed resuscitation. They created “People Week,” a series of special events along State Street and in the many department stores that still lined it.
“It’s designed to bring people into the Loop to meet other people and get rid of the bad image of its being a dangerous place,” a spokesman for the State Street Council explained on the eve of the 1976 “People Week.”
Three years earlier, Will Leonard, the Tribune’s nightlife columnist, teased one of the affair’s modest entertainments “A lady at the council tells us there’ll be a beautiful girl, Claudette Smith by name, who specializes in teaching men how to tie a bow tie.”
And in 1974, the Tribune noted the odd mix of high and low entertainment on State with a report that “at Quincy Street a group of young girls were demonstrating their Park District tumbling skills, next to an outdoor newsstand specializing in ‘adult’ books.”
During the 1978 People Week, Tribune photographer Hardy Wieting trailed Brett Shockley as the 20-year-old paraded in front of Lytton’s department store on stilts.
Decades earlier, such stunts weren’t necessary to draw crowds to State Street.
As a boy growing up in Albany Park, I found my way to the Loop as soon as I was old enough to navigate streetcars and the “L” on my own. I made Christmas season pilgrimages to Marshall Field’s where an escalator door opened to a mesmerizing scene: A boundless sea of electric trains and Erector Sets. For girls, myriad dolls, scaled-down highchairs and kitchen appliances.
Inside the street’s older office buildings, there were stamp dealers to be discovered amid the doctors and accountants of the older buildings. Old men pored over huge albums, looking for a commemorative postage stamp to fill in their collection. Across from them an equally old proprietor solemnly recited each stamp’s price.
I’d reverentially peer over their shoulders while awaiting a break in that tableau, then spend $2 on a glassine envelope containing 100 run-of-the-mill stamps.
Afterward, I’d have a dirt-cheap snack at Pixley & Ehler or a similar greasy spoon where I dreamed of having my name inscribed on one of the brass markers along counters that immortalized the “Loop Hounds,” as the novelist Edna Ferber dubbed them.
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People Week failed to resume interest in such pleasures, as suburban malls robbed State Street of its customer base. By 1979 Chicago’s moguls persuaded Mayor Jane Byrne to transform State Street into a mall. It was a city planner’s equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome: A victim’s bewildering identification with his kidnappers.
But why would mimicking a suburban mall draw visitors to the Loop? State Street lacked the enormous parking lots that made trips to Oak Brook Center and Old Orchard free of the hefty fees charged by Loop parking facilities.
Sure enough, the State Street Mall only quickened the demise of the Loop I cherished. Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp predicted that under a 1980 headline: “Great street gets a mall that appalls.”
“Nobody is going to drive in from Homewood or Arlington Heights to see the mall — at least, not more than once,” Gapp wrote.
Or, as Chicago Loop Alliance associate director Laura Jones told the Tribune for a 2019 story looking back at the mall: “It was just too big, too vast and you couldn’t drop Grandma off at Marshall Field’s.
Since the Mall was removed in 1996, State Street’s fate has recycled. Of its department store legacy, only Marshall Field’s survives but as a shell of its former shelf and under a different name. Carson Pirie Scott’s architectural masterpiece houses Target, a discount retailer. Neighboring storefronts are vacant.
But some attractions from the past remain, notably the Chicago Theater and other nearby entertainment venues that continue to attract crowds. And efforts to enliven the street continue, most notably with the Chicago Loop Alliance’s Sundays on State, which closes sections of the street to vehicular traffic for performances and events on a couple of weekend days during the summer — including this Sunday, July 14.
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