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:
“Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our civilization is characterized by the word “progress.” Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)