The clock indicates that the picture was taken at the moment when the great throng stood uncovered facing east in honor of those who fell in the World War. It is a far cry from the day in 1857 when James H. McVicker opened his first theatre on Madison Street between State and Dearborn Streets; and still a farther in the misty past is the day in 1845 when Chicago’s first public school was opened on the site of the Boston Store, then in School District Number 1. In 1857 Nicholson pavement had not been laid in these main travelled roads.
Courtesy of “Chicago and Its Makers” (Chicago: Felix Mendelsohn, 1929).
