By Jeff Huebner
Elliott’s ten-paragraph editorial, titled “Cultural Vandalism: The Tradition Continues,” concluded: “The men and women who created Chicago built a great city, but the greed and indifference of so-called ‘corporate mentality’ has all but destroyed it. There is little likelihood that the mindless cultural demolition of Chicago will not be complete by the end of the century.”
Born in Pennsylvania in 1839, Benjamin Franklin Ferguson moved to Chicago after the Great Fire in 1871 and made a fortune running a planing mill and a lumber company, both on the south side. Beginning in the 1890s Ferguson toured the major capitals of Europe and was awed by their abundance of civic statuary and fountains; he became acutely aware of his city’s lack of impressive monuments. He consulted with Art Institute officials and, encouraged by his longtime friends Hutchinson (the museum’s founder and president) and Burnham (the architect and city planner), decided to use most of his wealth to enrich the urban landscape.
But as the fund’s benefactor began to fade from memory, so did his original intent. In the early 30s the Art Institute began planning a major expansion program. Fund-raising from private individuals had declined with the onset of the Depression, so the museum began looking for new sources of cash. In 1933 its lawyers–without public notice and encountering no resistance from the Northern Trust Company–filed a complaint in the Circuit Court of Cook County asking whether the Ferguson will’s reference to “enduring monuments” could be interpreted to include other structures, such as buildings. The court decreed that the museum could use the bequest’s future income to finance a building addition, ostensibly to house sculptures. The court’s decision made the Art Institute the beneficiary, rather than the administrator, of the trust.
By the fall of 1958 the Art Institute had its new $2.3 million administration wing on the north end of the museum–$1.6 million had come from the Ferguson Fund (according to writer Elinor Richey, at the time the Ferguson Committee claimed to have spent $794,000 on sculpture since its inception). The Benjamin F. Ferguson Memorial Building, as it’s still called, houses offices, shipping rooms, repair shops, archives, a loading dock, and a members-only lounge. “Thus,” wrote Kutner in a 1963 issue of the DePaul Law Review, “the perversion of the Ferguson Monument Fund was complete. Not only had the administrators channeled the funds from a public to a private use, but the premeditated fraud had indeed been given judicial sanction.” (Kutner died in the early 90s.)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Prompted by Marovitz’s concerns, the state legislature in July 1961 enacted the Charitable Trust Act, which permitted any taxpayer to challenge an institution’s use of a charitable trust fund if the state’s attorney general refused to act. As a result the Chicago Heritage Committee (the nonprofit forerunner to the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois) and the local chapter of the Artists Equity Association mounted a vigorous campaign to regain the Ferguson Fund for public sculpture. In October the art groups’ members (some of them Cliff Dwellers, according to Elliott) and other citizens demonstrated on the sidewalk in front of the Art Institute, passing out handbills and forming a picket line. Signs read: “Is an office building a statue?,” “Return sculpture to the people,” and “We demand our inheritance.” The arts groups also petitioned the state’s attorney general to enforce the terms of the will, if necessary by carrying litigation to the higher courts.
