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December 21, 2008
Loyola history offers insight into city too
If you have a Jesuit in the family or enjoy Chicago history, check out “Born in Chicago: A History of Chicago’s Jesuit University,” (Loyola Press, $25) by Ellen Skerrett — a thorough account of Chicago’s Jesuit university, founded in 1870 by the “Hollander” Father Arnold Damen.
Recognize the name of the founder? Yes, it’s the Damen after whom the avenue was named. In Skerrett’s book you learn that he died in 1890, and 40 years later Chicago Catholics pushed for the street’s name change.
The name “Damen” was “talismanic.” He was “the best businessman ... in his generation,” Patrick H. O’Donnell argued before the city council’s Committee on Streets and Alleys on July 12, 1927. His opponents were the Wicker Park Chamber of Commerce and other merchants who clung to “the well-known name of Robey” for its commercial value. O’Donnell defended the renaming “as a memorial to [one of] our great spiritual men.”
The Chicago Tribune was on the merchants’ side. It railed against renaming, as it had railed against the building of Holy Family Church in 1857 as a threat to Protestantism. Alderman and Logan Square realtor Max Adamowski argued that the new name Damen would never be widely used. Indeed, my father, whose parents were married in Holy Family Church in 1927, regularly referred to “Robey Street” long after the renaming.
But the alderman was wrong, as we know. And many years later in 1988, the Tribune swung to the Loyola side with its support in a lakefront flap decided by a federal judge. Loyola wanted to fill in lake acreage for its own expansion and for what the university felt would be a betterment to the neighborhood.
All was ready for implementation, including beach and park, when environmental activists persuaded Carter appointee and Loyola (and Northwestern) alumnus Marvin Aspen to call a halt. The Tribune said the venture provided “dearly needed” public open space. The Lake Michigan Federation thought otherwise, claiming a federal violation, Aspen agreed, and that was the end of it.
Skerrett’s book is full of stuff like that. She digs and we the readers profit, though one might cavil at her dubbing Father Damen a “Jesuit Hercules.” That’s a matter of taste, however, and does not take from the book’s value not only as commemorative but also as a history that reads well, with hundreds of great pictures.
