Bordered by State and Dearborn Streets, and the Chicago River, Marina City is located on the site of the original Block 1 of the Chicago township, designated before Chicago became a city in 1837.

(Above) 1892 map drawn by Henry C. Brown showing “The Canal Lots” near the Chicago River. Marina City would be located in the extreme upper-right corner. (Click on image to view larger version.) (Below) Map superimposed with satellite image (circa 2006) from Google Earth. Click here to see just the Google Earth image.

The United States government granted the land to Illinois in the 1820s as part of “canal lots” on a ten mile wide strip of land along the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The canal ran 96 miles from the Chicago River to LaSalle, Illinois, on the Illinois River. Completed in 1848, it established Chicago as a transportation hub by allowing boats passage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. With the popularity of railroads, canal traffic slowed in the 1890s and eventually shifted to recreational use.

To raise money to help build the canal, lots were auctioned and many of the buyers were early settlers. Shortly before he died, Dr. Alexander Wolcott, Jr. (1790-1830) purchased Block 1 from the Board Canal on September 27, 1830. He paid $685 in cash.

(Above) Dr. Wolcott’s receipt for his purchase of Chicago’s Block 1 in 1830. It is signed by Board Canal Commissioners Edmund Roberts, Dr. Gershom Jayne, and Charles Dunn. It is hereby certified that in pursuance of Law, Alexander Wolcott, has this day purchased at public Sale, Lots number One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight, in block number One on the plan of the Town of Chicago, for Six Hundred and eighty-five Dollars, for which he has made payment in full.

Wolcott was born in East Windsor, Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1809. He moved to Chicago in 1820 as the U.S. government’s Indian Agent.

His predecessor, Judge Jowett, had started work on an agency house, a simple log cabin on the north side of the river near what is now North State Street.

Wolcott finished the cabin and it became the first building erected on the property. It would soon earn the nickname “Cobweb Castle” due to Wolcott’s poor housekeeping.

In the early 1820s, Wolcott presided at a gathering around the cabin of 3,000 Indians.

Wolcott was the first physician to reside in Chicago. North State Street was previously known as Wolcott Street.

When he died in October 1830, his will was the first will probated in Cook County. The property went to his wife, Eleanor Marion Kinzie (1804-1860), who was the daughter of pioneer merchant John Kinzie. Eleanor was the first person born in Chicago who was not a native American. Kinzie had the only other cabin north of the Chicago River, just east of what is now Michigan Avenue.

The Wolcotts married in 1823 – it was the second marriage performed in Chicago – and lived at nearby Fort Dearborn from 1823 to 1828 but then returned to the cabin.

Better known as Ellen or Nell, Eleanor Wolcott moved to Fort Howard in Wisconsin in 1831. She remarried in 1836.

The next owner was Thomas Dyer (1805-1862), who was mayor of Chicago, 1856-1857, and the first president of the Chicago Board of Trade.

Dyer sold the land to John S. Wright (1815-1874), a Chicago merchant. publisher, and real estate investor whose fortune was wiped out twice before he formed a land company designed to interest eastern capitalists in the midwest. In 1835 at his expense, he built the first public school in Chicago. Shortly after the Chicago fire of 1871, Wright was committed to an asylum.

Wright paid for the property in four installments over three years.

The next owner was Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, which in 1848 connected Chicago with lead mines at Galena. In 1850, the railroad was completed as far as Elgin.

During this time, the population of Chicago tripled over six years and Chicago became the largest railroad center in the world.

Galena & Chicago Union Railroad merged with several other rail lines to form Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. C&NW was a major midwestern railway system until 1995, when it was acquired by Union Pacific.

When it was sold to Marina City developers in 1959, the property was a vacant lot except for a 34-foot wide strip of railroad tracks that ran through the north half of the site, and extended west to Merchandise Mart.

Approximate location of Marina City today (center frame) in 1892 Currier and Ives lithograph of Chicago. The bridge in the lower left corner is a swing bridge at Rush Street. It was replaced in 1920 by the Michigan Avenue bridge. Above that, at where the river starts to turn (see Google Maps illustration in upper left corner of this page for modern-day comparison), is the present location of the State Street bridge.

Today, the abandoned railroad tracks (barely visible in the ground at lower right) extend east and west directly below the private driveway. The grating at right is the driveway entrance from State Street.

Below the site was part of Chicago’s extensive tunnel system. When caissons were being drilled for Marina City, they went through some of the long-abandoned tunnels.

During World War II, Chicago was a center for war-related industrial production and its population swelled. The trend did not continue immediately following the war. Between 1945 and 1959, 77 percent of all housing starts in the Chicago area were in the suburbs and most of them were single-family homes.

Most high-rise apartments being built in the city were in areas such as Lincoln Park, north of downtown. Urban construction stagnated. The Inland Steel Building, completed in 1957, was the first building constructed in the Loop in almost 30 years.

The federal government was investing more than $3,000 for every person living in the suburbs, and about $85 per person in the city.

It was Bertrand Goldberg’s belief that people wanted to live downtown. A 1959 survey by the Real Estate Research Corporation of inner-city housing needs concluded that demand would increase for apartment space within walking distance of the Loop.

Meanwhile, William McFetridge, president of the Building Service Employees International Union (now known as the Service Employees International Union), was concerned about his union members not being able to get jobs in the suburbs. He wanted to persuade people to live in town, where wages would be higher.

According to Howard Swibel, son of real estate developer Charles Swibel (1927-1990), all William McFetridge knew was that he wanted to invest his union’s pension fund not so much in stocks and bonds, but in something progressive – something that would help people. He mentioned this to Charles Swibel, who suggested the union invest in housing. Specifically, housing for working people.

Originally, the thought was to build housing that was affordable to union members. Says Howard, “It turns out that even though the apartments were not expensive, I wouldn’t say a typical janitor could afford it. But it helped the community.”

Housing was an area in which Charles Swibel had experience. In 1955, at age 29, he became the youngest member of the Chicago Housing Authority board of directors. He had been appointed by newly-elected Richard J. Daley as a favor to Arthur X. Elrod, who was county commissioner and 24th Ward Committeeman.

Investing its large pension fund, the union awarded Goldberg the commission to develop Marina City on a site the architect had first recommended as a location for a new union headquarters. The union had rejected that proposal as too expensive.

The site was purchased by Swibel, a close friend of McFetridge, who optioned the property for $3 million. That meant, for a time, they had the exclusive right to purchase the property for $3 million at a future date. However, the actual amount paid up front for the option could have been closer to $300,000.

Swibel, then president of the mortgage banking firm Marks & Company, would later be chairman of the troubled Chicago Housing Administration, and eventually forced to resign by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development over claims of mismanagement.

In their book, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Elizabeth Joel Taylor and Adam Cohen describe McFetridge and Swibel as “extremely close to Daley” and that the $3 million ($21 million in 2007 dollars) paid for the Marina City site was “well below market value.”

However, this was one of the first “air rights” deals in Chicago, development of the empty space above a property. Explains Howard Swibel, “If you’re operating the railroad, you need the land because you’ve got to put tracks in, you’re not looking at it as a revenue producer. Somebody comes along and says, ‘how about we buy the air space above your tracks,’ it’s like a bonanza. It’s gravy. It’s ‘found money.’”

The same railroad tracks led to 200 South Riverside Plaza, an office building in the West Loop which also was built on air rights.

Architect Bertrand Goldberg (left) presents a model of Marina City to William McFetridge (center) and Charles Swibel (right). Curiously, according to The Art Institute of Chicago, the architectural model of Marina City is missing. Says Lori Boyer, Exhibitions and Collections Manager, “It’s one of the mysteries of the building, as it was sizable and not easily moved or stored.” Geoffrey Goldberg, the architect’s son, says the last time he saw it, in 1980, the balcony railings were starting to fall off.

Planning began in 1959. The first drawings of the project included two 40-story rectangular buildings, but the “footprint,” or required surface space, would have overwhelmed the site. Goldberg submitted a second design in which the towers were 65 stories and round.

Wind tunnel tests at Illinois Institute of Technology concluded the new shape was more efficient, at least more wind-resistant.

The idea of round buildings may have come from an earlier, rejected design for Executive House (now Hotel 71), a hotel built in the north Loop in 1960. Or it may have come from Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, who in 1949 designed “The Helix,” a 22-story cylindrical apartment building for New York developer William Zeckendorf.

Geoffrey Goldberg, the architect’s son and himself an architect, has his own theory. In 1952, his father completed work on a design for a railroad car. Because of a steel shortage, the challenge was to design a rail car that used steel more efficiently. According to Geoffrey’s own research into his father’s work, Goldberg created a “monolithic tube-like structure” made of layers of strong plywood. The plywood was then laminated under heat with special plastics.

The “Unicel Prefab Freight Car” was unveiled with much fanfare at Merchandise Mart in Chicago and The Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. (Left) Exterior of a Unicel freight car. Inside was a tube constructed of specially-laminated plywood.

“I believe the boxcar done in the early 1950s was for my father the real structural breakthrough. It is a tube structure. And put that together with the use of curved concrete in a later project – work in the mid-50s for a sewage plant in Nashville – and it’s not too far to get to a vertical tube, the concrete core, at the heart of the towers at Marina City.”

Inside the core were elevators and stairways, surrounded by a circular corridor, then a ring of bathrooms and kitchens, followed by living quarters and balconies. The Helix was never built. A version of it was proposed in the mid-1950s for lower Manhattan, but that wasn’t built, either.

Goldberg did design a cylindrical motel in 1957 that was never built. The idea may have endured and found its way into the design of Marina City two years later.

The unusual shape wasn’t the only problem. The Federal Housing Administration initially turned down the loan request because, according to Goldberg, single adults or couples living downtown did not meet their standard of a “family.” Goldberg went to Washington, D.C., personally – more than once – to lobby for Marina City and get the FHA to broaden its interpretation. Furthermore, the mixed use (commercial and residential) violated zoning regulations. Goldberg worked with Planning Commissioner Ira Bach, who supported the project and got the necessary approvals.