Threatened Damen Silos a remnant of Chicago’s days as a ‘Stacker of Wheat’
If the Damen Avenue Silos are demolished, they will take with them some of the final remains of Carl Sandburg’s poetic salute to Chicago: “Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat.”
The stockyards closed more than a half-century ago. About the only trace of Chicago’s manufacturing glory is the forest of balconies tacked onto repurposed factories. Now the Silos’ owner, Michael Tadin Jr., wants to level the massive industrial complex in the 2800 block of South Damen Avenue.
Tadin bought them from the state of Illinois in 2022. Reportedly, he wants to replace them with a trucking facility, a corporate headquarters or both. The demolition plans are on hold pending a review by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
When the Santa Fe Railroad built the Damen Silos in 1906, Chicago ruled the wheat market, having transformed American agriculture.
“Let the golden grain come. We can take care of it all,” a Chicago newspaper proclaimed half a century earlier. The Chicago Board of Trade was nicknamed “the Altar of Ceres,” the ancient goddess of grain.
That history is lost in the vague misnomer “silos.”
Inland Architect magazine in 1896 called the towering silos the first skyscrapers. One of the silos is 15 stories tall. It dwarfs buildings of the time with their human occupants. In fact, it and its companions are parts of a grain elevator.
The other components are a mechanism that lifts grain to a platform where it would be routed to one or another of its vertical storage bins. Those are the silos, and each has a spigot toward the bottom. When it was opened, gravity would send the wheat down to whatever vehicle would take it away.
Noting that Chicago’s grain elevators stood between the West — where wheat was grown — and Eastern cities that needed it, the Illinois Supreme Court, writing in a rate regulation case, said they “take toll of all who pass.”
Invented elsewhere, the grain elevator was perfected in Chicago. Its ungainly progeny can be seen in the towns and hamlets of Middle America and beyond.
“An elevator is as ugly a monster as has yet been produced,” said the British author Anthony Trollope while touring America in 1861. ”In uncouthness of form it out does those obsolete old brutes that used to roam the semi-aqueous world, and live a most uncomfortable life with their great hungering stomachs and unsatisfied maws.”
The Tribune seconded Trollope’s judgment
“Immensely ponderous, high-towering, dreary-looking structures, whose vast sides are scarce ever found pierced by windows, and whose general monotony of outline is seldom relieved by so much as the slightest ornamentation,” the paper observed of Chicago’s massive grain elevators in 1892.
Today the Damen Avenue Silos, out of use since the late 1970s except for occasional movie shoots, look even sorrier.
But then grain elevators were never intended to be attractive. They were an engineer’s response to an accountant’s innovation.
In 1857, the Tribune reported that the Board of Trade had established a system for grading wheat, while noting some quibbling over the details. Those disputes continued for years, but from its inception, the wheat grading system was a game-changer.
Formerly, a farmer had to shovel his harvest into individual gunnysacks, a laborious job. Now he could pitchfork it into a wagon or truck and get it to a public warehouse, as a grain elevator is legally defined.
“The theory of a public warehouse here is that grain must go in and out at the same grade,” the Tribune noted in an 1895 explanation of the wheat trade.
To grasp how the theory works in practice, consider the analogue of a bank. The dollar bills someone gets when making a withdrawal are not the same ones he deposited. But they have the exact same value.
Similarly, the grain a farmer withdraws from an elevator isn’t the grain he brought there. It couldn’t be. His harvest has merged with that of other farmers who brought the same grade of wheat to the elevator. What a famer has is a receipt showing the amount of wheat he is entitled to withdraw.
That is the hidden beauty of those dreary elevators. A farmer doesn’t have to hustle to bring his grain to market when wheat commands the price he wants. He just sends the elevator operator a sell order.
Collectively, all the wheat in various elevators enables the market to respond to changes in demand, yet those who play it see only the tip of an iceberg.
“There is many a member of the Board of Trade who makes and loses a dozen small fortunes a month in grain deals who couldn’t describe the general plan of the average grain elevator to do so,” the Tribune observed in 1892.
On the trading floor, a visitor would be befuddled by what novelist Frank Norris called “the trampling and shoutings in the Pit.”
Norris’ novel “The Pit” (as the trading floor was called) is the story of a millionaire trader bankrupted by a failed attempt to corner the wheat market.
Much the same happened in real life. The thought of all the wheat in grain elevators tempted some traders to dream of controlling so much flour that merchants would have to pay a trader’s jacked-up price or forgo filling bakers’ orders.
Among them was Ira Munn, who pioneered the grain elevator in Chicago. He became fabulously rich and president of the Board of Trade. Then he tried cornering the market. As the Tribune reported, a rumor spread that “all was not right with Munn and Scotts elevator receipts.” More wheat had been sold than the firm owned. In 1872, Munn was expelled from the Board of Trade. He ended up running a boardinghouse in a Colorado gold-mining town.
In addition to being subject to unscrupulous speculators, Chicago’s 100 or so grain elevators were vulnerable to fire. Wheat isn’t usually very combustible. But a grain elevator houses a flammable mixture poised to explode: large amounts of grain dust in a confined space and suspended in air; the oxygen of that air; and heat supplied by static electricity. Other factors might include a sticking conveyor belt or even a carelessly discarded cigarette.
Grain explosions regularly occurred on the site of the Damen Silos. Operators of fallen elevators didn’t move on because of Chicago’s topography.
Ideally an elevator should be bordered by water on one side, railroad tracks on the other. To accommodate that, Chicago held an advantage over St. Louis, where the broad and shallow expanse of the Mississippi River was unsuitable for such a setup. The slow-moving and steady Chicago River, along with its solid banks, proved more amenable, and the Damen Silos were built between the water’s edge and railroad tracks.
Much of that accompanying infrastructure disappeared after the Damen Silos were abandoned in 1977 following a massive explosion. But the Silos’ 15-story centerpiece still visually testifies to wheat’s role in Chicago’s growth from a frontier settlement to a metropolis.
The tower is disfigured by generations of graffiti. Bruised and battered, it has the look of a boxer still on his feet at the final bell, anxiously awaiting the judges’ decision.
Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.
