The Building
The two-story Wigwam was built by Chicago business leaders to attract the 1860 Convention. It was a temporary structure, built entirely of wood in little more than a month, and it could accommodate 10–12,000 people. The building was used for political and patriotic meetings during the Convention and the American Civil War. It also served as a retail space until its demolition, some time between 1867 and 1871.
Following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, another "Wigwam" building at Washington (one city block south of Lake) and Market served as the temporary home of the Chicago Board of Trade.
Antebellum custom was to call a political campaign headquarters a Wigwam. Wigwam is also a Native American word for "temporary shelter".
Read more about this topic: Wigwam (Chicago)
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“... what’s been building since the 1980’s is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That’s what will last after this flurry on family values.”
—Stephanie Coontz (b. 1944)
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)