Devoted Chicago history buffs must be experiencing repeated episodes of deja vu during the struggle over the proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. It eerily mimics the struggle, more than a century ago, over the site of the Field Museum.
Both fights involve bitter differences of opinion over the city’s lakefront: Should it be left pristine or dotted with cultural amenities? Both involve head-butting by the rich and powerful. The current one pits a Hollywood mogul, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, and the city’s hard-driving mayor against a group of do-gooders, the Friends of the Parks.
In the earlier donnybrook, two local moguls squared off: Marshall Field, who made State Street the city’s shopping rialto, on the side of a proposed museum, against Montgomery Ward, who made Chicago the hub of the mail-order industry and was a staunch protector of the city’s lakefront as a public space.
Then as now, lawsuits involving arcane legal principles were accompanied by insults worthy of a guttersnipe. Ward’s attorney accused Field of building a monument to himself, facetiously adding: “And being a poor man, he could not afford to pay for a site. Now it is proposed to secure a site from the city of Chicago by violating a trust.”
Asked why Ward was bucking Field, one of the early presidents of the museum said: “I do know he once was a clerk in the Field store.”
That battle, which would ultimately outlive one of the combatants, began Oct. 27, 1893, when Field pledged to contribute $1 million toward a museum to permanently house exhibits from the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was about to close. Originally it was to be known as the Columbian Museum. Field didn’t court publicity.
“Really I do not care to discuss the museum question at all,” Field told a Tribune reporter. “I would prefer that my name be kept out of it entirely.”
Others involved in the project recognized that a famous name attracts others with money. So a year later, the museum was renamed the Field Columbian Museum, subsequently shortened to The Field Museum, changes that lived up to their promise. John G. Shedd, the second president of Marshall Field & Co., would endow the aquarium that sits alongside the Field Museum. Max Adler, vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., would do the same for the nearby planetarium.
More immediately, it put Field on a collision course with Ward, the self-described guardian angel of Chicago’s lakefront.
The Field Museum was originally sited for the lakeshore at Congress Parkway, and upon its announcement, Ward filed a lawsuit. He claimed that when he purchased nearby property, “he relied on plats … in which appeared the words: ‘Public ground, a common to remain forever open, clear and free from any buildings or other obstruction whatever.'” Still, Ward was open to compromise, tired after years of hectoring and suing the city to clean up what is now Grant Park, which was then little more than a dumping ground. If guaranteed that the museum would be a unique exception, Ward would drop his opposition.
But developers were rushing proposals to the park’s commissioners, who turned down Ward’s offer. The game was on.
The combatants were very different types. Field had a broad circle of friends, business associates and fellow philanthropists to support his fight for the museum. Ward was a loner who shunned social gatherings. “Perhaps I may yet see the public appreciate my efforts,” he told the Tribune. “But I doubt it.”
Ward had one critical ally, however: time. Like a sports team, he could win by running out the clock.
Field, who died in 1906, left an additional bequest of $8 million for the museum, but his donation was contingent upon the city providing a site, free of charge and within six years of his death. Ward knew that if he could keep the project tied up in the courts until midnight Jan. 1, 1912, he would win.
Accordingly, the legal papers flew back and forth, accompanied by a war of words. Field’s supporters played on the public’s heartstrings, much as Lucas’ wife, Chicago businesswoman Mellody Hobson, recently did when the current museum plan hit a snag. “It saddens me that young black and brown children will be denied the chance to benefit from what this museum will offer,” she said.
A Field Museum trustee had vowed 109 years earlier: “We are going to help 2,000,000 people have their way against one obstructionist,” the Tribune reported.
There were oddball legal maneuvers, akin to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s recent request for an appeals court to keep a Friends of the Parks lawsuit from even being heard. The Illinois legislature passed a bill in 1903 enabling the park board to void Ward’s easement on Grant Park, his legal right to have it free of buildings. “You can pass all the state legislation you want to,” an aide to Ward responded, “but it will not be constitutional if Mr. Ward complains.” Indeed, the Illinois Supreme Court sided with Ward, as it did on several occasions.
Stymied, the museum’s partisans offered ways out of the deadlock, some as creative as Emanuel’s plan to knock down a city convention hall to make room for the Lucas Museum. Stanley Field, Marshall Field’s nephew and successor, lobbied the state legislature in 1910 on behalf of a bill that would grant the museum submerged land in Lake Michigan to fill in and build on the resulting island. The project was dubbed the Atlantis museum, but Ward vetoed it.
The park board offered a site in Garfield Park, and then an alternate one in Jackson Park, the site of the World’s Fair that gave birth to the museum project. The clock was ticking down, and the museum trustees were about to settle for the latter offer. But at the last minute, the Illinois Central Railroad offered land at 12th Street upon which it had planned to build a terminal.
That is where the Field Museum finally came to be built, starting in September 1911.
The battle of the Titans had ended in something of a draw. Field got his museum, albeit posthumously. Ward, who died in 1913, lived to see his lakefront still largely unspoiled. Chicagoans got both: a world-class museum and an incomparable shoreline.
Perhaps balancing the exhausting struggle that accompanied its birth, the Field Museum opened without fanfare May 2, 1921.
“The doors were simply opened at 2 o’clock, and the first of the 8,000 guests entered,” the Tribune observed. “Speeches and music would have been superfluous.”
