ON OCTOBER 22, 1986, more than two hundred people gathered outside the Major Hotel, at 662 West Madison Street, right next to the bridge over the Kennedy Expressway, in an attempt to halt the building’s demolition. “Housing for the needy, not for the greedy,” they chanted, invoking the private speculators who were already active on West Madison. Led by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, the Statewide Housing Action Coalition, and the Balanced Growth Coalition, the protesters demanded that the developers pay for the Major’s rehabilitation and 620 additional units of low-income housing, on-site or elsewhere, for people displaced by earlier evictions.
The protesters’ grievance was not primarily aesthetic, and the Major Hotel was no architectural masterpiece. Gently mocked as the “Waldorf Astoria of Madison Street” by locals, the Major was among the first fireproof concrete-frame hotels in the area when it opened in 1927. Stuck between the Expressway and the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center, the five-story brick pile rose over a humble storefront. Semicircular …
