Gompers & Wacker

Downtown yesterday for a luncheon and a number of person-to-person interviews. Don’t do too many of those. Mostly interviews are by phone, meaning a land line, though occasionally I need to use my cell phone for that purpose. I remember brilliant warm day one summer I happened to be on the North Side of Chicago when the time came for an interview, so I stopped at Gompers Park and talked to the interview subject by cell, on a park bench.

Samuel Gompers Park, that is. Probably during his lifetime the labor leader wouldn't have dreamed that the city would name anything after him, but there it is.

Yesterday my time was constricted, so I couldn’t pay as much attention to detail as I like to. But, speaking of naming places after people, I did notice a plaque at the corner of Lake and Wacker, one I’m not sure I’ve seen before, honoring the construction of Wacker Drive, the city’s unique two-level street that edges the Chicago River. And who was chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission at the time of the construction of Wacker Drive in the early 1920s? Charles Wacker.