FOR NEARLY 40 YEARS, “Cap’n” George Wellington Streeter made a colorful career of insisting that he owned the sandy shoal off Superior Street where his boat had gone aground in an 1886 storm. Streeter maintained that his “DISTRICT OF LAKE MICHIGAN,” which eventually was filled in to create 200 acres and is now Streeterville, owed allegiance only to the U.S. government. His claims, backed up with the rifles and thrown bricks of fellow squatters, somehow kept courts and the cops busy for decades. After the Cap’n’s death this week in 1921, his widow, known as “Ma,” vowed to keep the fight going. Unfortunately, it emerged that Streeter already had a wife in Indiana. Poor Ma Streeter was more of a squatter than she realized.
Name of the houseboat where the Streeters lived for years: VAMOOSE.
Years that a makeshift open-air chapel served illegal-immigrant squatters in a canyon outside San Diego before it and the squatters were evicted last month: 20.
Rank of the Near North Side, including Streeterville, on Forbes’ 2006 list of worst neighborhoods to buy a home, based on appreciation: 3.
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“One thing that establishes a frontier is the precarious nature of the human hold on it.”
–Author And Poet Kathleen Norris
Sources: Tribune archives, news reports
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nwatkins@tribune.com
