Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on May 31, 2005 0:49:35 GMT -6
Adler, Shedd still shine at 75
This from the Chicago tribune.
Published May 30, 2005
Chicago merchant prince Max Adler, who made a fortune at Sears, Roebuck & Co., was not particularly interested in astronomy. John G. Shedd, another merchandising wizard who made his pile at Marshall Field & Co., never showed much curiosity about marine biology.
Yet 75 years ago this month, they had spent a significant portion of their personal wealth giving to the city two great institutions that bear their names still, the Adler Planetarium and the Shedd Aquarium. The $1 million Adler opened May 12, 1930; the $3 million Shedd on May 30.
The two institutions, each still world leaders in their respective disciplines, are marking their anniversaries all year long with special events. The aquarium will celebrate its anniversary Monday with free cake and ice cream bars for visitors, strolling musicians, beauty queens and costumed characters representing all the eras of the Shedd's life so far.
Two world-class institutions sprouting at the same time just a few hundred feet apart is not so much an accident of history as the product of a civic altruism that is almost unique to Chicago.
"There was a spirit in Chicago that it was inappropriate to make a lot of money and then not put it back into the city," said historian Donald Miller. "It's a kind of civic philanthropy you really don't see in other cities, like New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere."
Miller wrote "City of the Century," a study of how civic leaders rallied around the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition as a means to boost Chicago's image from raucous frontier town to a great world metropolis.
"The generation that put together the 1893 exposition also was extraordinary in terms of how it poured personal money into building the city's museums, hospitals and universities," Miller said. "But the generation that followed, if anything, amplified those ideals."
To replicate the Adler and the Shedd from scratch in 2005 might cost a half billion dollars, especially if factoring in the expense of the massive tracts of landfill each is built upon. A century ago, the location of each was well offshore in Lake Michigan.
The Shedd is on landfill laid down to extend Grant Park, creating a place for the city's natural history museum, a gift to the city more than 30 years earlier from Shedd's mentor, Marshall Field, founder of the department store dynasty.
The Adler was built at the north tip of Northerly Island, an artificial island created from landfill as a site for the 1933 Century of Progress world's fair. The island eventually was connected by a landfill causeway between the Shedd and the Adler, and the fairground site became the now-defunct Meigs Field airport.
The 1933 fair had a great deal to do with the Shedd and the Adler being built at the same time. Civic leaders wanted the aquarium and the planetarium up and running in time for the fair's opening as world attention turned to the city.
The idea of putting an aquarium across the street from the Field Museum in Grant Park had been around for a long time. When the Field put up its new building and moved there from Hyde Park in 1921, planners had left a big swath of landfill just northeast of the Field for an aquarium.
All that was needed to build it was some money.
"My grandpa was a farmboy from New Hampshire who came to Chicago as a young man and made it good here," John G. Shedd's grandson, John Shedd Reed, recalled last week.
Reed said his grandfather decided in the early 1920s that he wanted to give away part of the fortune he made here as Field's successor as president of the department store company. He appointed a committee of business and social leaders to help him find a worthy project.
"`What does the city need most?'" was the question Reed said his grandfather asked. "They came back and told him about the aquarium. That's how he decided on it. I don't ever remember him being much interested in fish or even fishing. He left the plans for the aquarium up to the professionals."
What they designed was the world's biggest indoor aquarium and the world's first inland aquarium to hold both fresh and salthingyer species. The salthingyer came in tank cars from Florida; the salthingyer species were collected in Florida and California and shipped in a special Pullman car called the "Nautilus," equipped to keep marine life alive in transport.
Reed said he attended the aquarium's grand opening as a 12-year-old, but enthralled by railroading, he missed the ceremonies "because I was so fascinated by the Nautilus, I stayed there all day."
He grew up to become president of the Santa Fe Railroad.
Max Adler, born in Elgin, was a gifted, classically trained violinist who played professionally as a young man until he realized he was never quite good enough to be great.
He instead opened a store in Chicago and sold instruments until being hired by his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenwald, who took over Sears, Roebuck and turned it into the biggest retail business in the world. Adler rose high in the ranks not because of family, but because he proved to be so astute and hard-nosed that Rosenwald relied on him.
Sears was such a powerful national business presence in the 1920s that even vice presidents such as Adler were celebrities, at least among the circles of the rich and famous.
Adler, for example, who took his violin everywhere, once invited Albert Einstein, who was an amateur musician, to join him and two cronies to form a quartet for an evening of chamber music. The others allowed the physicist the honor of playing first violin.
"Professor Einstein is the first man to whom Max has played second fiddle in years," Adler's wife said afterward. Another friend who attended claimed: "A great violinist Professor Einstein may be, but I have the impression that after the concert Max Adler regarded him more highly than ever as a scientist."
When Adler retired from Sears in 1928, he was looking for a project involving music to donate his money to, but another friend talked him into going to Germany to see a remarkable new invention, the Zeiss planetarium projector.
The projector had to be positioned at the exact center of a hemispherical room, where it could project the images and movements of the night sky on the inner surface of a dome.
Adler immediately grasped the potential of the instrument, how it could expose mass audiences to astronomy and the concepts of time and space. He ordered Zeiss to build an instrument for Chicago and began working out architectural plans for the building to house it, the first true planetarium in the Western Hemisphere.
Later he bought an immense private collection of antique scientific instruments and telescopes for the planetarium galleries. With subsequent purchases, it has become the third largest such collection in the world.
"The fortunes of life impose corresponding obligations," Adler said at the planetarium's opening. "Possession spells duties--duties to the community in which one lives."
John Shedd Reed marveled at Adler's words last week, ticking off a list of present-day corporate chieftains who have been going to prison or are facing prosecution for serious crimes and breaches of ethics.
"They sure are a contrast to the actions of today's so-called tycoons," he said.
By William Mullen
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Interesting facts behind the Planetarium.
An observation... on the way to our prep areas, (in the non-public sections of the Adler), there are very nice and interesting photos of the construction and early days of the Adler. From the early pics, the Adler looks so small and I can't imagine how it fuctionally exisited all those decades in that cramped space.