A couple of weeks back, the Journal reported on the sale of the old Illinois Bell building on Lake Street near Euclid. It went for $5.8 million and was purchased, along with 74 other now AT&T buildings across America, by Reign Capital, a real estate developer in Manhattan.
We described the building as nondescript and were saddened to learn its new owners would not implode it and start from scratch. Instead, it seems likely to remain a data center filled with, we suppose, data and the technology to contain such information.
Got us thinking about how it all got started when 110 years ago the Chicago Telephone Company needed a building to house its operators to connect all the calls coming through the local exchanges.
Frank Lipo, the lead fellow at the Oak Park River Forest Museum, shared our curiosity and has the archives to back up any surmising.
Lipo sent us an image from a March 1915 Oak Leaves of a handsome two-story brick and Bedford stone structure on the site at 714 Lake St. It was designed by E.E. Roberts, these days a noted architect in Oak Park history, though he did not get a mention in the Oak Leaves story.
Instead, the newspaper noted the building was designed to carry an additional two stories at some future date.
But in 1915 it was large enough at 280,000 cubic feet to accommodate switchboards and operators enough to manage an anticipated 10,500 telephones in Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park.
It wasn’t until 1949 that the building was expanded by two floors and its exterior was fully remade into the dull monstrosity we see today. Notable that the phone company spent $5.5 million on the expansion, not quite as much as the data warehouse sold for recently. That update included converting all of the Euclid, Village and Forest exchanges to a full dial system.
Yes, those were the days when your phone number started with letters.
