Some scouting for a potential next project, and this frankly adorable news item cropped up. In 1927, Chicago was about to build its long overdue replacement for Henry Ives Cobb’s disastrous 1905 Postoffice and Federal Building. It was also in the midst of the air mail revolution and at the hub of a rapidly expanding network of aviation routes that offered unheard-of speed. The city’s air mail facilities moved from Grant Park (!) to Maywood, but the field there wasn’t convenient to the city–fine for mail being transferred but not great for mail destined for downtown. Plans to base air mail at Chicago Municipal Airport (later Midway) were being developed, but that field was undersized, crowded, and about to endure a decade-long fight over its expansion into a reasonably sized facility.
So, why not combine the new postoffice with the air mail field?
“Plans for new Chicago Postoffice provide landing field for air mail planes” the Tribune announced in July, 1927, along with a rendering–presumably by Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White, but not attributed–of a monumental, neoclassical postoffice for the blocks between Harrison, Polk, Clinton, and Canal streets–with air mail planes wandering around its flat-topped roof.
At six acres, and with a long dimension of just 800 feet, the rooftop was “considered somewhat small for an airport,” but authorities looked at the anticipated schedule for the postoffice and the pace of development in aviation and concluded that “by the time the building is erected the airmen will be able to make it serve their purposes.” Aircraft manufacturers were “now working out the problem of how to stop and start airplanes from a limited area of six acres,” and postal officials were confident that would be solved shortly.
Spoiler alert: It was not. When Municipal did expand from a quarter-mile square to its current mile-square footprint, the primary driver was runway length for new, heavier planes that required more distance to land safely. The new field would feature diagonal 3000 ft. runways–without the proposed postoffice rooftop’s six-story drop at both ends. Similarly, the city’s blithe reassurance that “the height of adjacent buildings would not interfere with the landing of airplanes on the roof” came even as the 555′ Civic Opera Building was breaking ground, less than half a mile north and–definitively–in the flight path of the proposed 600′ runways.
Rooftop airports had been proposed before–there were rumors that the flat top of the Blackstone Hotel would house a runway for airplanes in 1910 (“admittedly,” the Tribune reported regretfully, “not to be used by amateur aeroplanists, for in case of accident the dropping is far and the available spots for alighting are not softer than a well-seasoned cement sidewalk.” And every spiky building top of the 1920s seemed destined to become an airship mooring mast.
But, alas, cooler heads prevailed. The air mail facility was moved to Municipal later that year (a former air mail pilot named Lindbergh helped inaugurate it), and the postoffice design evolved to the four-towered, vertically-striped behemoth that has enjoyed a rebirth as a giant commercial office building. The erstwhile rooftop runways are, in fact, now an outdoor amenity deck. But even if aircraft aren’t landing on top of the Old Post Office, the building maintains the distinction of being one of the few structures to have an expressway burrowing through it, at least…
architecturefarm 