Critics of the new Soldier Field stadium say it’s a Ty-D-Bol, a jerry-rigged monstrosity, a blight on Chicago’s architectural history.
But in many ways, the new Soldier Field that opens Monday night simply reflects the changes in Chicago, sports and even American society since the campaign began to build a government-owned stadium south of downtown almost 100 years ago.
For its first half-century, Soldier Field was a gathering place for eclectic events that mirrored changes in Chicago society and the power of groups that at the beginning of the 20th Century were marginal –though growing–influences on the city. Catholics, Jews and African- Americans all found their way into the public eye through celebrations at the field, and the entertainment and rallies at the stadium reflected the fads of the day–and the work and thinking of the city.
Chicago Park District officials hope to make the new Soldier Field as much a part of the city’s life as the old one was. Officials say party rooms at the field already are well booked through the end of the year. And crowds still gather for sports and concerts, as they did when the old stadium opened in 1924.
Yet the type of mass meetings that helped make Soldier Field famous before the stadium became the Bears’ home in 1971 rarely happen. The people who built the original Soldier Field might recognize its colonnades at the new stadium, but many of the events they envisioned for it likely would no longer draw crowds.
The battle to build it
Debate over whether to build a government- owned stadium at the south end of Grant Park began about 1911. Chicago boosters weren’t looking for a home for a sports team. The city’s two private baseball clubs were the only professional teams that drew crowds, and they were doing so well that they were building ballparks on their own.
What city fathers envisioned was something like college football stadiums –and the ancient stadia of Greece and Rome. In pre-World War I America, college football was a dominant sport, along with professional baseball. Almost every stadium built in the first half of the 1900s mimicked, in some way, Harvard Stadium and the Yale Bowl, both built before 1915.
“Clearly, the stadiums were built for the public to come watch these college games,” said Mark F. Bernstein, author of the book “Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.”
Chicago’s civic leaders especially had in mind the money that the large crowds were bringing into their colleges.
“Not only would the stadium give the people of Chicago a great deal of enjoyment, but it would attract thousands of visitors,” Mayor William “Big Bill”
Thompson said in a May 1919 letter to the South Park Commission, the precursor of the Chicago Park District.
Thompson and his backers envisioned the proposed stadium luring the Olympics, national political conventions and trade association meetings to Chicago.
Despite popular support, Soldier Field was a hard sell to some. Chicago’s Gold Star fathers and mothers–the parents of those killed in World War I–at first balked at the idea of “a supposed memorial that in reality is a travesty on the name,” the chairman of the Gold Star Fathers Memorial Committee told one newspaper.
But following an architectural competition, the South Parks Board chose the influential Chicago architectural firm Holabird and Roche to design a neoclassical municipal stadium that fit with the nearby Field Museum.
The stadium was among the several public works projects that future Mayor Edward Kelly, then head of the South Parks Commission, used to bolster his own political fortunes. Newspapers criticized Kelly for handing his cronies contracts for the stadium, Grant Park construction and Sanitary District work.
At first, the arena was known as Grant Park Stadium, but from the first, city leaders planned it as a war memorial– and dedicated it as one on Nov. 11, 1925. Its name officially changed to Soldier Field in two days of ceremonies presided over by U.S. Vice President William Dawes and culminating in the Army- Navy game Nov. 27, 1926.
The design created bad sightlines for football. In later years, Mayor Richard J. Daley defended the sightlines even as he mulled tearing down the field.
Not just for football
To show off Chicago, the earliest events at the field celebrated the prowess of the city’s police and firefighters and its history.
Its first event was a police athletic meet, complete with motorcycle polo, tugs-of-war and what one paper called “Roman chariot racing.” Its official opening ceremonies on Oct. 4 and 5, 1924, commemorated the 53rd anniversary of the Chicago Fire and saw a re-enactment of the fire’s first moments in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn. The stadium went far beyond reflecting Chicago’s work and disasters, however, and became the grandest stage for Chicago’s religious and cultural life.
In the 19th Century, city government was dominated by Protestants such as Joseph Medill. By the 1920s, Catholics were close to taking the reins of power, and a mass for a Eucharistic Congress celebrated at Soldier Field in June 1926 often is cited as a turning point in Chicago’s Catholic history. A Marian Year celebration of Sept. 8, 1954, another Catholic event, drew 260,000 people, the largest crowd ever for a Soldier Field event
Some historians say an event that’s still held, the Prep Bowl–which is expected to be played again at Soldier Field this year after an absence during the renovations –did more to bring Catholics into the mainstream in the city than even the Eucharistic Congress. The annual game, first played in 1927, brings together the best Catholic Metro Conference football team and the best Chicago Public League team.
City leaders at the time were largely Protestant and supported the public schools as a way to “Americanize” immigrants, said Gerald R. Gems, a professor at North Central College. But while many attended a separate school system, “Catholics were increasingly being drawn into the mainstream culture.”
And although Catholic parishes often were divided on ethnic lines, sports teams brought all the factions together, Gems said.
Secular newspapers and the Catholic weekly, The New World, pumped up fans of the contending teams for 10 years, until in 1937, a mammoth crowd of 120,000 jammed Soldier Field for the Austin High vs. Leo High game.
It’s still considered one of the biggest football crowds in history. At the time, the still-young Bears were drawing a few thousand a game at Wrigley Field. They wouldn’t move into Soldier Field until 1971.
“That’s what’s really amazing about sports in general. The people around you are of all different stripes,” said John Russick, a historian at the Chicago Historical Society and curator of the current exhibit, “Chicago Sports! You Shoulda Been There.”
Though the stadium failed to secure the Olympics for Chicago as hoped, it still was the site of such events as the 1959 Pan Am Games and the 1927 “long count” prizefight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney.
The first football game played there, on Nov. 22, 1924, pitted Notre Dame and Northwestern in a game won by the Irish, 13-6. Other famous games included the annual game pitting college all-stars against the defending NFL or Super Bowl champion team. That was played from 1933 to 1976.
Political presence
In addition to its status as a sports icon, Soldier Field also has been the site for dozens of political and social rallies.
A 1944 rally for President Franklin D. Roosevelt was only one of the more memorable political gatherings. Chicago thrilled with the rest of the country when Col. Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in April 1927, and the city hosted Lindbergh that Aug. 13 as “the hero of the world.”
Lindbergh’s reception was more mixed 13 years later, when he arrived in the city Aug. 4, 1940, to again speak at the stadium. Lindbergh pleaded for the United States stay out of World War II and urged the country to cooperate with Germany if it won the war. The speech brought a rain of protest upon Lindbergh, and many people wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, denouncing Lindbergh as a “traitor” and a “rat.” Eventually he was denounced by many as anti-Semitic after a speech in which he blamed Jewish interests for steering the country toward war.
Changed the transition hereA few years before Lindbergh cozied up to Germany, Chicago’s Jewish population played a large role in bringing together Jews from around the United States in common cause. Chicago’s the Century of Progress World’s Fair, in 1933 and 1934, held more than two dozen special days to commemorate the contributions of various ethnic groups to Chicago. One of the most successful, Jewish Day, culminated in a pageant, the Romance of a People.
At the pageant, 100,000 people watched a re-enactment of Jewish history, beginning with Moses and ending with the establishment of the Jewish settlements in Palestine, said Walter Roth, president of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society.
The day helped forward Zionism, a movement to establish a Jewish state. When pageant organizers succeeded in drawing Briton Chaim Weizmann, one of the most famous pro-Zionist orators of the time and later the first president of Israel, as a speaker for Jewish Day, Jewish groups from all over the country took notice and organized a massive gathering.
“It was very important event, because it established Zionism as a very important aim for Jews,” said Roth, author of “Looking Backward: True Stories from Chicago’s Jewish Past.”
Less successful than Jewish Day at the fair was Negro Day, which drew only 50,000 people and which many African-Americans boycotted because of their exclusion from many aspects of the fair. Still, Soldier Field did unite Chicago’s black community over the years.
Many accounts of the stadium’s history have noted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Soldier Field of July 10, 1966, which took place during his campaign against slums in the city. But often forgotten is King’s earlier speech at Soldier Field, on June 21, 1964, just after the U.S. Senate passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.
Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, of the South Side’s Apostolic Church of God, was master of ceremonies at the 1964 address. He said that even though the anticipation for the results of 1964 Civil Rights Act was high at the time of the event, just having King in Chicago was enough to energize civil rights activists here.
“It wasn’t so much what was happening in some legislation in Washington. Just his dynamic presence and speaking ability gave real legitimacy to everything that people here in Chicago were doing in regards to civil rights,” Brazier says.
The rally saw 57,000 people at Soldier Field–more than attended King’s 1966 speech. The program closed with Mahalia Jackson leading the crowd in singing “We Shall Overcome,” according to a Tribune account.
Through the years, music has played a big part in Soldier Field celebrations
At first a way to bring attention to the field and bring plaudits to political leaders, concerts took on a life of their own in the 1970s. Rock bands such as the Rolling Stones, Parliament Funkadelic and the Grateful Dead, who played their last show at Soldier Field on July 9, 1995, drew a new audience to the field, and helped fill the Park District’s coffers.
Concerts and other small happenings helped keep Soldier Field afloat. But what really saved the stadium from the wrecking ball in the early 1970s was the Bears’ move there.
Coming together
To the last, the old Soldier Field remained the city’s most important gathering place, in part because it is the city’s only large public arena, says the Historical Society’s Russick.
“It reflects the interests of the city. It’s a way in which Chicago elevates certain issues to a national stage,” Russick says.
With the opening of a reincarnated Soldier Field, Park District officials are hoping the stadium will continue to bring Chicagoans together for many events other than Bears games. New rooms inside the stadium mean “You have a lot more opportunities for meetings, weddings, bar mitzvahs,” and other small events, says parks General Supt. David Doig.
As part of its effort to use the field for events other than Bears games, the Park District will show the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Psycho” on the stadium’s two giant video boards on Oct. 25.
Over the years the seating capacity at the field has shrunk from a peak of more than 100,000 to today’s 61,500, but Bears and Park District officials hope the new, smaller stadium will enhance the team’s home advantage, and make seeing a game there more exciting.
The high-tech aspects of the new stadium, though, show what Chicagoans expect when they’re part of a gathering of people in the 21st Century. Once, fuzzy announcements of players’ names over a loudspeaker were enough to hold people’s interest; now, even the festivals being planned for the field play to a culture that grows bored without flash.
But then, burning down a barn in the middle of a stadium is kind of flashy too.