Streeterville

The land east of Michigan Avenue was created out of whole cloth, or more accurately, out of sand drifts and landfill. Every time someone built a pier, the capricious lake would add a little more acreage to the shore. Chicagoans, being the creative opportunists that they were, realized they could make something out of nothing, so the lake became a dumping ground with a purpose. That’s how Grant Park grew, how Lincoln Park grew, and how enterprising entrepreneurs created the entire neighborhood of Streeterville.

Most of these entrepreneurs were your typical industrial barons, merchants, bankers, and real estate speculators, like the Palmers, who seemed to buy up chunks of the new land as soon as it stopped drifting. If it weren’t for an upstart rapscallion with creative ethics, the neighborhood might have been called Palmerville. But George Wellington Streeter had big dreams and antics that filled Chicago’s imaginations—and the headlines.

There are lots of legends associated with Cap Streeter, mostly hatched and promoted by the man himself. Variously known as a gunrunner, a circus promoter, a Civil War soldier, and a steamboat operator, he wove a romantic tale of being stranded by a storm in 1886. Fortuitously, it was a few hundred feet off of Superior Street. Being a sailorman of twenty-five years accustomed to living on boats, he and his wife, Maria, decided to stay right where they were. The lake did its thing, and their little sandbar grew into acres. Everything was fine for a couple of years, but then the landlubbers claimed that Cap was in their riparian right-of-way and he had to go. No way. He declared his beach the District of Lake Michigan, a commonwealth of the United States. Those rapacious scallywags would have to fight him if they wanted him to give up his land.

They tried for decades. The first salvo happened in 1890 when N. K. Fairbank swore a writ of forcible detainer against Cap, who was arrested. 

Two years later, in response to a suit brought by George against Fairbank, the Chicago industrialist claimed that Mr. Streeter had approached him in the spring of 1889. Cap told him city authorities insisted he move his boat from Superior Street, and he wondered if he could move it onto Mr. Fairbank’s property while he made the necessary repairs. Mr. Fairbank said sure, but Cap didn’t move it. Neighbors complained because the Streeters and their District denizens were so rowdy. Cap even had his wife locked up for insanity in 1891.

In this same court case, Mr. Henry Russer, the upstanding caretaker of the Newberry Estate, claimed in an official affidavit that it was all part of a grand scheme. The summer of 1890, the wily Cap confided to Mr. Russer that he planned on getting rich by squatting on the land and then claiming it as his own. 

Even N. K. Fairbank's death in 1903 didn't stop the conflict. There were gunfights, countless court battles, and forged patents. In 1918, a judge finally ruled that Cap did not, in fact, “own ‘The Deestrick of Lake Michigan’” but the fight continued, even after Cap died in 1921. His boat stuck around for another few years. In 1928, a harbor engineer finally announced that the ancient houseboat would be hauled out of Ogden Slip, and once it was dry enough, they’d burn it.

While all this drama played out, Lake Shore Drive extended from Oak Street to Ohio Street and Streeterville, as it had been called since at least the May 9, 1899, edition of the Inter Ocean, marched inexorably towards its ritzy future.