Everything is on this tour. (See below for the itinerary.) Architecture, history, religion, education, violence, war, movie-making, civic structures, railroad lore, industry, journalism. You name it. This tour's got it.

And if you have stamina, you can probably catch the alderman's attention at some point to register a complaint, pay a compliment or enjoy your tour guide's approach to the sites in his ward. Sign up materials are on the alderman's website.

Alderman Fioretti’s 1^st Annual, 2^nd Ward Historic Bike Ride follows this route.....

• 26^th and King Dr. – Monument to the Great Northern Migration

- This bronze statue of a man carrying a worn suitcase in his left hand and gesturing toward the north with his right symbolizes the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to Chicago and other northern cities in the early 20^th century.

• 18^th and Calumet – Site of the Fort Dearborn

- The Battle of Fort Dearborn occurred on August 15, 1812, during the War of 1812. Because a number of women and children were killed, this event is sometimes known as the Fort Dearborn Massacre.

• 1327 S. Wabash – Filmack Studios (Famous Players – Lasky Corporation Film Exchange)

- Despite filled-in windows, the glistening terra-cotta triumphal doorway conveys some of the exuberance of Rapp & Rapp’s cinema palaces. Paramount Pictures’ logo remains in one corner of the cornice.

• 1307 S. Wabash – Warner Brothers Film Exchange

- Integral zigzag brickwork rather than applied ornament lends interest to this Art Deco exchange.

• 1301 S. Wabash – Universal Studios Film Exchange

- This yellow brick structure features an intact, curving glass-block corner.

• 1152 S. Wabash – Roosevelt Hotel

- The abandoned and severely deteriorated hotel gained new life as moderate-income apartments. The gently undulating bays of the façade are reminiscent of some of Holabird & Roche’s work of the 1880s.

• 1076 W. Roosevelt – St. Ignatius College Prep

- The upstanding and disciplined façade is decidedly French, from the mansard roof to the projecting pavilion, to the string-courses and quoining. The formal five-part façade features a columned entry atop a double axial staircase.

• 1080 W. Roosevelt – Holy Family Church

- A hardy survivor, the church is a tribute to the craftsmanship of neighborhood workers and to the leadership of Jesuits from the parish’s founder, the Reverend Arnold J. Damen, to Father George Lane, the head of a 1990s restoration campaign. The phlegmatic German Gothic structure is bent with age; some of the tall Gothic pillars are as much as eighteen inches out of plumb, displaced by the weight of the slate rood. The altar front features a folksy Last Supper – down to carved knives and forks.

• 1522 W. Fillmore – Thomas Jefferson Public School

- As Board of Education architect, John J. Flanders designed dozens of schools during the early 1880s and early 1890s; only a handful from the era before his partnership with William Carbys Zimmerman are still in use. Tall and foreboding, most of them have even lost Flanders’s signature Flemish gables, replaced with a flat parapet requiring lower maintenance.

• 1300 W. Jackson – Timothy J. O’Connor Training Academy (Haymarket Riot Monument)

- The only tangible reminder of the 1886 disturbance is the sculpture now in the courtyard of this modernist training center. The police officer, his arm upraised, restrains an invisible mob, commanding peace “In the name of the people of Illinois.” The controversy that surrounded the riot continued to plague this statue, which was erected near the site. The plaques at the base were stolen in 1903, and later a streetcar motorman rammed into the statue, claiming to be sick of looking at it every day. Moved to Union Park in 1928, the statue remained unmolested until the civil unrest of the 1960s, when it was defaced with black paint and twice blown up by a bomb. The statue was placed under twenty-four-hour guard and moved to Central Police Headquarters, from which it was transferred to its present site in 1976.

• 558 W. Dekoven – Chicago Fire Academy

- Firefighters are trained on the site of the Patrick O’Leary barn, where a cow allegedly kicked over a lantern, setting off the holocaust of 1871. The tall building is the drill hall, where trainees learn to operate snorkels, maneuver on fire escapes, and open windows. The red glazed brick is a back drop for the flame-shaped sculpture by Egon Weiner.

• Harrison and Canal – Former Central Post Office

- It was designed to straddle the broad Congress St. projected in the 1909 Plan but not realized until decades after the building’s completion. When opened this was the world’s largest post office. With four large corner towers, the rectangular mass is further subdivided into base, shaft, and top; the verticality of uninterrupted piers and narrow windows somewhat mitigates the length. The Van Buren St. lobby is clad in cream marble with French glass and tile relief’s. Multistory postal operations require the heavy use of elevators and are regarded as inefficient, so a new post office to the south was completed in 1996. The building’s mammoth size has stymied a series of development schemes.

• 610 S. Canal – United States Customs House

- Eagles hover in the parapets of this sleekly massed, pristine government facility.

• 47 W. Polk – Dearborn Station

- Chicago’s oldest train station is a U-shaped Romanesque building whose Italian brick tower closes the Dearborn St. vista. The tower is a replacement of a Flemish one, destroyed in a 1922 fire, which also took the building’s hipped roofs. The reworking station, compromising a cleaned-up but historic north façade and a modern galleria to the south, acts as a transition between the renovated printing district and the new Dearborn Park Development.

• 1006 S. Michigan – Columbia College

- This highly refined office building features large amounts of glass set in Chicago windows as well as columns and beams that have been reduced to the minimum.

• 1234 S. Michigan – Inventions (Universal Pictures Film Exchange)

- This late film exchange replicates the Art Deco Style of the earlier exchanges on Wabash.

• 1500 S. Michigan – Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church.

- The light colors of the metallic roof and precast concrete walls were chosen for their ability to reflect light and heat. High-performance glass used throughout also reduces the amount of solar gain.

• 1936 S. Michigan – Second Presbyterian Church

- James Renwick, architect of the Smithsonian Institution and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, had in 1849 designed the city’s first Gothic Revival Church, destroyed in the Fire of 1871. This replacement was built of a local limestone with bituminous mottling accented with strong horizontal bands of black rock from the same quarry. The strongest elements of Renwick’s Gothic vocabulary, a steeply pitched roof and rose window, were altered after a fire in 1900. The interior is imbued with the Arts & Crafts and Pre-Raphaelite influences introduced in Shaw’s rebuilding and by muralist Frederick Clay Bartlett. A tree of life mural on the west wall, a screen with four heralding angels, the strapwork ceiling, and a palette of muted red, blue, green, and gold against buff and dark oak are a backdrop for an unrivaled collection of nineteenth-century stained glass.

• Michigan Ave. (From Roosevelt to 29^th) – Motor Row

- In the 1880s the fashionable residential area of S. Michigan Ave. acquired a “magnificent stretch” of asphalt pavement “as level as a billiard table.” After 1900 car dealers were eyeing the wide, deep lots for showroom and by 1910 had created what Architectural Record called “the longest and best automobile course in any city of this country,” with at least forty new buildings selling or servicing cars. Ground-floor remodelings have altered some of the ground-floor facades, so look up to see the broad windows and fanciful terra-cotta logos that remain.

• 2000 S. Michigan – The Locomobile Lofts (Formerly Locomobile Showroom)
• 2222 S. Michigan – Hudson Motor Co. of Illinois
• 2309 S. Michigan – Automobile Buildings for Alfred Cowles
• 2120 S. Michigan – Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven (Formerly Chess Records)

- This is Chicago’s only buildings to inspire a Rolling Stones song, which was named for the building and recorded here in 1964 as a tribute to Chess Records.

• 2400 S. Michigan – Chicago Daily Defender Building

- This two-story brick building with its lantern-topped clock tower employs a simplified Spanish Mission styling. Many of the social aspects of automobile clubs vanished after World War II, when cars became more readily available to the average person. This building has housed one of the nation’s leading African-American newspapers since the 1950s.

• 2401 S. Wabash Ave. - Quinn Memorial Chapel

- Quinn Chapel AME Church, also known as Quinn Chapel of the A.M.E. Church, houses Chicago's oldest African-American congregation, formed by seven individuals as a nondenominational prayer group that met in the house of a member in 1844. In 1847, the group organized as a congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and named the church for Bishop William Paul Quinn. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the church played an important role in the city's abolitionist movement. The 1871 Great Chicago Fire destroyed the original church, and the congregation met for many years in temporary locations before purchasing the present site in 1890. The current structure, designed by architect Henry F. Starbuck and built in 1892 at 2401 South Wabash Avenue, is a reminder of the late 19th century character of the area. The church was designated a Chicago Landmark on August 3, 1977, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 1979

• 3300 and King Dr. – Camp Douglas

- In 1861, a tract of land at 31^st St. and Cottage Grove Ave. was provided by the estate of Stephen A. Douglas for a Union Army training post on the original site of the first University of Chicago. The first Confederate prisoners of war, more than 7,000 from the capture of Fort Donelson in Tennessee, arrived in February 1862 by the Illinois Central railroad which ran along the shore of Lake Michigan just to the east of the camp. Eventually, over 26,000 Confederate soldiers passed through the prison camp, which eventually came to be known as the North’s “Andersonville” for its inhumane conditions. A large green plaque now recognizes the camp at the edge of the parking lot of the now-closed funeral home.

- As well as being the site for Camp Douglas, the Griffin funeral home is known for being the location where Emmett Till’s funeral was held in 1955.

• 3213 S. Calumet – Robert W. Roloson Houses (Frank Lloyd Wright)

- The only Frank Lloyd Wright row houses every built date from the early years of his independent practice. In them he reduced the Jacobean gable to a simple geometric form. The roman brick wall is a severe but lovely backdrop for Sullivaneque terra-cotta panels.

Sources:

Sinkevitch, Alice, and Laurie McGovern. Petersen. AIA Guide to Chicago. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com)