1929 Chicago Daily Tribune Excerpts

The onset of Prohibition in the 1920s sent Chicago into a downward spiral of organized crime as well as highly feared and publicized cases of vice that played out at the downtown courthouse located at 54 W. Hubbard Street. However, this courthouse was deemed highly inadequate to handle the sheer number of criminals who needed to inhabit its walls, sending the building into disrepair (Noel). And while the building’s exterior did sport Neoclassical style influences, specifically Richardsonian Romanesque, it did not deviate in appearance too heavily from other buildings at the time (Chicago.gov). Per the Chicago Daily Tribune, the same cannot be said about the downtown courthouse’s replacement: the Cook County Criminal Courthouse built in 1929.

Impressed with the amount of governmental investment in the building, one article from 1929 deems structure a “the new $7,500,000 de luxe Criminal court building.” As aforementioned in the history section of this e-portfolio, Chicagoans in the 1920s had descended into a full-time crime panic, so the fact that over $7 million (over $100 million today) was invested in this criminal justice project, was an event fit for headlines as evidenced in this article. Nowhere was this investment more noticeable than in the courthouse’s interior and exterior ornamentation, which the same article reported as being "beautifully decorated" and apt for Hollywood. 

Addressing the public’s concerns over the need for a sufficient jail system in the wake of the Hubbard Street institution, an article from March 9, 1929, published  two days after the court’s first open house, notes that this very goal was achieved. Though unacceptable by modern norms of criminal institutions, yet reflective of architect’s Ralph Warner Hammett’s intent for the jail, the Chicago Daily Tribune published an article with the headline, “New Cook County Jail Wins Praise of Criminologists.” Per a criminologist cited in the article, the jail was reportedly constructed “so that attention may be given to individual prisoners instead of only to the mass of inmates.” In an era where less than half of homicide cases resulted in convictions, this individualized care was a lauded quality.

Chicago daily tribune (Chicago, Ill.), May 18, 1873 Links to an external site. by Library of Congress/Public Domain

Report of the Committee on New County Jail and Criminal Court Building 

Previously addressed throughout this e-portfolio is the Report of the Committee on New County Jail and Criminal Court Building, a lengthy document supported by a plethora of notable Chicagoans across a wide variety of public offices, written with the intent to create a suitable court building to replace the existing downtown institution. This report can be read as a symbol of the almost universal effort in the late 1920s to quell Chicago’s crime problem, which only months prior to the court’s opening had reached a climax with the Valentine’s Day Massacres (Eig). As such, the report notes that any proposal made to this end be “judged from the standpoint of the greatest good to the greatest number.” However, as will be evidenced by other statements in the report, what constitutes “good” and who is deserving of it would not hold by modern standards.

Most illuminative of the committee’s conception of “good” is in their reasoning for selection of an expansive land plot for the site of the new court. The report argues that the plot at 26th and California provides enough room to construct a building that will be a “credit and an ornament to the county and City,” as well as a “suitable setting for a real hall of justice.” while these statements echo the architect’s chief intent for the court, which is to build a site that would aid the administration of criminal justice in Chicago, the report defines a “real hall of justice” as being one that provides “ample opportunities” not only for “occupation and education” but for “segregation.”

Notably, the report also mentions the intent to have a building that would  “increase respect for the dignity of the court and uphold the majesty of the law,” (Noel 19). As discussed in the style section of this e-portfolio, the committee’s chosen mechanism to achieve this end was Neoclassical design. However, seeing that Neoclassicism as a genre of design has has historically also been an edifice of white supremacy, these notions of respect and majesty may more so be in the vein of the committee’s desire for having room to segregate, rather than traditional Greco-Roman ideals.

Western Architect Excerpts

In the 1929 periodical, The Western Architect, architect of the Cook County Criminal Courthouse Eric Edward Hall and design consultant Ralph Warner Hammett voice their perspectives on their latest architectural feat, as well as their plans for the space. Here, the aforementioned discrepancy between intent and reality can be foreshadowed, in that the attributes of the courthouse the men celebrate can easily be seen as problematic by modern standards. 

Nowhere is this contradiction more present than in Hall’s article entitled “Cook County’s Criminal Court and Jail in the Making.” Here, Hall captures the ethos of the area in which criminal justice administration and reform was a universal concern, arguing that “the community is responsible for [prisoners] while they're [in the court and jail] and should guard their health and general well-being.” While this statement appears reform-minded and joins Hall’s praise of the space for bringing in light and preventing disease via its layout, he later states in the same article that “the prisoner must expect an absolute confinement.” This statement is joined by a celebration of the fact that the “plan of the Criminal Court building provides complete separation of the public from prisoners,” who are “always within steel walls.” Thus, not only did the committee purposely choose an alienating location for the court out of public view, but they took extra measures to ensure that prisoner’s would be isolated, and thus likely stigmatized. This is only compounded by Hammett’s following article which lauds the fact that the jail cells were designed to be “purposely so small.”         Western Architect/Public Domain

While the Neoclassical elements only receive brief mention in this periodical, their discussion nevertheless highlights a similar contradiction. While discussing the “[non]superfluous ornamentation” which adorns the courthouse’s front exterior, Hammett notes that the Greco-Roman elements provide a “great deal of dignity” amid the other criminal justice buildings on the plot which he describes as being “severe in character.” However, Hammett does not specify whom this “dignity” is for or how the ideals conveyed by the “eight sculpted figures which dress the attic story” are integrated into the design so that they may be felt by the prisoners purposely confined to live in conditions of “severity.”