Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Dec. 4, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 66 degrees (1998)
- Low temperature: Zero degrees (1893)
- Precipitation: 1.19 inches (1973)
- Snowfall: 6.4 inches (2016)
1940: A United Airlines DC-3, laden with ice on its windshield and wings, stalled and crashed into a house at 6350 S. Keating Ave. on its second landing attempt at now-Midway International Airport, killing 10. It’s believed to be the first commercial airplane crash in the city.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Plane crashes that stunned our city
The crash caused the Civil Aeronautics Board to recommend that stall-warning devices be installed on airplanes to let pilots know when they are going too slow to stay aloft and to urge research into ways to reduce icing.
1969: Police raided a two-flat at 2337 W. Monroe St. — Illinois’ Black Panther Party stronghold — killing party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Officially, the Cook County state’s attorney’s 4:30 a.m. raid by 14 Chicago police officers began as the execution of a search warrant to turn up weapons and explosives that the feared black power group was supposedly hoarding inside.
Column: 50 years later, it’s easier to see how the Black Panther raid changed racial politics
Survivors described a far more frightening scene: Officers armed with shotguns and rifles opening fire on sleeping Black Panther members inside, among them Hampton’s pregnant fiancee. A special federal grand jury determined that police sprayed 82 to 99 gunshots through doors, walls and windows, while just one shot appeared to have been fired by someone inside.
2008: Mayor Richard M. Daley struck a deal to close a budget shortfall — the city got a paltry $1.16 billion upfront in return for a 75-year lease of Chicago’s paid street parking system to Chicago Parking Meters (CPM). Nearly all of the one-time windfall would be spent by the time Daley handed over the reins to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
The contract required the city to drastically raise rates on behalf of the company.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: 10 biggest bummers in 100 years of city history
Chicago’s inspector general confirmed in 2019 that the city had sold out for far less than the lease’s value. A report by Bloomberg Business said CPM stood to earn about 10 times what it paid over the life of the contract.
“Any way you slice it financially, Chicago got taken to the cleaners,” the Tribune Editorial Board wrote in 2023.
2020: Longtime 10th Ward Ald. Edward “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak was sentenced to 10 months in prison after pleading guilty the previous year to conspiring to commit mail fraud in a scheme to collect a $1.5 million fee when Rosalind Franklin University went to sell a Gold Coast property.
Vrdolyak served about five months of an 18-month sentence for a 2019 guilty plea to a tax charge alleging he obstructed an IRS investigation into payments to and from a friend and associate related to the state’s $9.2 billion settlement with tobacco companies in the late 1990s.
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