When the first few visitors enter this year’s Chicago Auto Show, they will be making history.
They will be visiting the city’s largest auto show ever, thanks to the relocation of the event from McCormick Place East to the new McCormick Place South.
“The change to the larger venue is indicative of how support of the auto show grows,” says Jerry Cizek, president of the Chicago Automobile Trade Association and general manager of the show.
The auto show has been held at five venues, three of them named McCormick Place.
Starting with the first Chicago Auto Show in March 1901, the exhibition settled into the now-defunct Chicago Coliseum at 15th Street and Wabash Avenue for 33 years (the show wasn’t held for a few years in World War I).
The castle-like facade of the Coliseum, built in 1899, was part of the original enclosure of the Confederacy’s Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., which held 45,000 Union soldiers in the Civil War. The prison was rebuilt on Wabash Avenue in 1888 as a tourist attraction. Except for the facade, the prison was torn down to make way for the Coliseum.
The first auto show was fairly small. Two gasoline-fueled cars shared the spotlight with three steam-engine cars and five electrics. The show also featured motor bicycles and motor boats. It drew several thousand people.
As the automobile industry grew early in the century, so did the Chicago Auto Show. By the early 1930s, the Coliseum was no longer a fitting exhibit hall for the show, which was drawing tens of thousands of people.
“It was a real confining space,” recalls Clarence Marquardt, 77, a former president of the Chicago Automobile Trade Association, who visited the show at the Coliseum with his father. “It was very tight inside and parking was extremely limited at that time along Wabash Avenue.”
Despite the space constraints inside and out, the show had an air of professionalism, says Marquardt, whose family dealership, Marquardt Motor Sales Inc., in Park City, near Rockford, has been around 79 years.
“At the time, it was the Depression, and the inducement the (dealers) used to give to the salesmen manning the show was to buy them a new suit,” he says.
In 1935, the show went under the sponsorship of the Chicago Automobile Trade Association, which moved it to the year-old International Amphitheatre at 43rd and Halsted Streets. (Before this, the show was put on by an entrepreneur named Samuel Miles, editor of an automobile trade magazine called Motor Age.)
The show’s organizers marveled at the 225,000 square feet of Amphitheatre floor space and the 10,000-seat arena used for the annual musical, “Motorevue.”
In the beginning, it was a more than adequate setting for the show, then already displaying nearly 1,000 cars and drawing 50,000 to 75,000 visitors daily.
Those who visited the show at the Amphitheatre, across from Chicago’s famous Union Stockyards, remember drawbacks.
“While the Amphitheatre was the best place to put on the show at the time, you could smell the animals,” says Marquardt.
After going on hiatus for a few years in World War II, the Auto Show continued to grow in the late 1940s and 1950s, when auto-reliant suburbs were booming.
By the late 1950s, the Amphitheatre was congested. “Space was limited, but everybody seemed to be organized well within that space,” says Marquardt.
With the addition of space at the Amphitheatre, the auto show had grown to nearly 300,000 square feet of exhibits. But it was still growing.
In 1961, the CATA moved the exhibition to the new $35 million McCormick Place on Chicago’s lakefront.
The move allowed the show to expand to more than 300,000 square feet, adding popular exhibits such as concept cars and permitting manufacturers to showcase new cars on turntables.
“At the 1963 show, I remember the white Corvette that was on display there when they came out with the first Stingray,” says Greg Grams, director of the Volo Auto Museum near Grayslake. “The car was on a white turntable and there was smoke coming up from the floor. It was so awesome.”
Its lakefront location also made it more accessible, so the crowds grew with the show.
After only six shows in the new venue, however, the auto show faced a setback in early 1967, when McCormick Place burned to the ground on a frigid Jan. 16. The show was scheduled to start there Feb. 11.
“As I recall, the organizers of the show had a real job in front of them to get the show on,” says Cizek. “They decided to run it again at the Amphitheatre and pulled out the floor plans for the last auto show there. Then, they got each of the manufacturers to agree to the old floor plan.
By pushing the show back a couple of weeks, the planners were able to pull it off, says Cizek.
“Everything went fine except that there were fire marshals all over the place,” says Cizek. “Mayor (Richard J.) Daley’s crown jewel had burned down, and he wasn’t about to lose his other exhibit hall.”
Returning to the Amphitheatre while McCormick Place was rebuilt over the next few years meant the show was again faced with space constraints.
To add insult to injury, the first show at the Amphitheatre was hampered by Chicago’s Big Snow, 23 inches that had fallen the night of Jan. 26, 1967.
With a less-accessible location next to the stockyards, few were happy with the return to the Amphitheatre.
“My father didn’t want to go the Amphitheatre,” says Grams, who remembers going there in 1968. “He didn’t like the location. I don’t know if he knows that I went.
“But I was 18 in 1968, and my dad was allowing me to buy a car,” adds Grams. “So I went to the Amphitheatre and I came back and bought a 1968 (Chevrolet) Chevelle.”
Though the exhibits were attractive, Grams says the Amphitheatre was “tight, musky and dark.”
By 1971, McCormick Place was rebuilt and the Chicago Auto Show was one of the first exhibitions to return to the lakefront.
On the opening Sunday, the show drew a then-record 160,000-plus visitors (that record was eclipsed in 1989, when more than 171,000 attended) and nearly as many people were turned away, according to police estimates. It took three hours to make the short trip from downtown Chicago to McCormick Place.
It was a taste of things to come.
“In recent years, I don’t see how (the show’s organizers) could have continued to do anymore at McCormick Place (East),” says Grams, whose museum for several years has been running the antique auto exhibit there.
“I never thought the new McCormick Place would be too small, but it happened fairly quickly,” says Marquardt, show chairman in 1972.
The new location will allow organizers to increase floor space by about one-third, to some 840,000 square feet. More important, it will contain the show on one level, versus the two levels at the previous McCormick Place, says Paul Brian, director of communications for the CATA.
“Because of space constraints, trucks were relegated to the lower level of the show and now the manufacturers will be able to combine cars and trucks in the same exhibit,” says Brian. “Also, some of the European manufacturers who had to be on the lower level are now going to be able to bring their larger displays because they don’t have the ceiling height restrictions of the past.
“In the future, we’d like to take over the McCormick Place East building when they’re done renovating that and go out to a full 1.2 million feet for the show,” he says. “Then, you’ll also see motorcycles, some RVs and certainly medium- to heavy-duty trucks.”
