The Storied (and Sometimes Strange) History of Soldier Field (2024)

[Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

In 1919, the South Park Commission held a design competition for what was originally envisioned as a central gathering place "for events and a playground for the people." The architecture firm Holabird & Roche won the competition and designed a U-shaped stadium in neoclassical style, complete with matched Doric colonnades that opened on October 9, 1924 as the Grant Park Municipal Stadium. Its sobriquet was changed one year later to honor soldiers lost in World War I. The ceremony to mark the change was held on Armistice (now Veterans') Day and began with a firing of guns at sunrise, a 21-gun salute at 11 a.m. aside from the parades and ceremonial flag-raisings.

[The 1942 Army War Show sought to drum up support for the war effort. Photo: Chicago Park District Special Collections via The University of Chicago Press.]

Today, Soldier Field remains one of the few stadiums still standing from the storied "Golden Age" of sports. The stadium was designed for flexibility, and it hosted everything from visits by heads of state, to football games, boxing matches, stock car races, and even ski jump competitions. Its pre-Bears history is rich: the Monsters of the Midway didn't even move in until 1971.

The first football game hosted in the stadium was, indeed, a football game. Notre Dame faced off against Northwestern in November of 1924 (ND won 12 to 6) but before that, on October 9, a "Chicago Day" event was held to mark the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

The event featured a formal dedication and official opening with a mock battle, a horse-riding exhibition from the U.S. 14th Cavalry, and a re-enactment of the fire complete with a cow kicking over Mrs. O'Leary's lantern. Ten firemen who had actually fought the great fire used the city's first pump engine against the mock blaze in which a replica O'Leary barn was burned down. Some variation of this event was held there until 1970.

But Soldier Field's early years were also marked with some less-professional exhibitions, like an amateur horse-shoe pitching match and the South Parks Marble Championship. Sunrise Easter observances were also held annually.

The rematch drew a gate of $2,658,660 ($22 million today) and set a simultaneous record for the first $1 million gate and the first $2 million gate. The fight has gone down in history for a controversial decision by a referee in the seventh round when Dempsey knocked Tunney down but the referee didn't begin the count until Dempsey had moved to a neutral corner, allowing Tunney extra time to recuperate. He went on to win the fight and spoil the hopes of many betting fans including, according to rumor, Al Capone.

Several years later, a war show celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of George Washington's birth was held June 24, 1932. It was an 11-day event opened by an 8 p.m. flyover by four squadrons of fighter planes (perhaps anticipating the Air & Water Show) escorting Amelia Earhart in a plane painted to resemble a red and white eagle. Earhart joined the famous who addressed crowds in the stadium when she later arrived to address and medal and recount her 1931 flight across the Atlantic Ocean to the crowd.

[The 1933 World's Fair. Photo: Getty Images.]

During the 1933-1934 Century of Progress World's Fair, Soldier Field hosted the opening ceremonies and a dizzying array of events from the mundane and regular (another round of the South Parks Marble Championship) to the more elaborate and unusual.

Several shows celebrated "racial" history with the Fair as a background. On July 3 1933, 150,000 spectators attended "A Romance of a People," an elaborate Jewish pageant telling the history of their people. Chaim Weizmann (later the first president of Israel) opened the show which required over 6,000 performers. It was so successful an encore was staged a few days later.

Perhaps less elaborate was the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the first Swedish immigration to the U.S. and "Epic of a Race" show, which celebrated African American history, though it did feature 1,500 performers. The performances tied into the fair's theme of "progress."

But the legacy of the fair wasn't all warm memories. As the famous "Sky Ride" across the lagoon was being demolished in August 1935, its west tower fell onto a portion of the field's exterior walls necessitating $50,000 in repairs.

[Collectors of memorabilia missed out on this ticket, but there may be more out there.]

For some reason in 1947 auto racing in the field became popular. Both midget and stock car races were held within the field for years to come.

President Harry Truman made a trip to Soldier Field on June 19, 1949 to preside over the event marking the 75th anniversary of the Shriners, the first event at the stadium ever to be televised. The big anniversary celebration included one of the largest parades in the city's history, with 15,000 members of the fraternal order from 1,000 chapters and 130 bands. The parade covered three miles and lasted five hours culminating at the field.

But perhaps the largest event ever held at the field was the Marian Year tribute of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. It's estimated that 180,000 attendees were inside the stadium itself while another 80,000 listened outside on loudspeakers.

Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a Chicago Freedom Movement rally at the field June 21 1964 that drew 75,000.

[A view from inside the stadium. Photo via the Curbed Chicago Flickr pool/Frank Hashimoto]

But Lohan fired back with this:

"I would never say that Soldier Field is an architectural landmark. Nobody has copied it; nobody has learned from it. People like it for nostalgic reasons. They remember the games and parades and tractor pulls and veterans' affairs they've seen there over the years. I wouldn't do this if it were the Parthenon. But this isn't the Parthenon."

The renovations moved forward and by 2006, Soldier Field had been stripped of its National Historic Landmark Status by the National Park Service. Leaving Chicago with what some described as a spaceship that landed on the lakefront.