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Chicago mayor
Carter Harrison Jr. appointed George D. Williams Building Commissioner and head of
Chicago's Building Department on May 17, 1903, when
Peter Kiolbassa resigned the position amidst a political hailstorm.
Williams brought three characteristics to the position that Democrat mayor Harrison
thought would please the city's contractors and complaining aldermen:
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Williams was an experienced building contractor.
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The Chicago Masons and Builders Association, of
which Williams was president, recommended him to
the mayor.
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As a Republican, Williams
was not from the mayor's political party so Harrison's critics could not accuse him of
political patronage.
From graft to theater safety
Williams hit the ground running. He
first made a pet project of enforcing a newly passed
tenement-house ordinance for fire escapes. In
the fall, he took on the theaters. It was
timely. The city council's October 1903 graft
investigation had brought forth Chicago
building contractor,
Milton Bushnell, claiming he'd lost the La Salle
theater remodeling contract because of building-department
graft. Williams proposed the creation of a full-time committee
to investigate problems with municipal employees,
calling it a "grievance committee."
He knew, though, that any reform needed a better
foundation of information than existed in Chicago.
The condition of the city's theaters needed to be
measured and enforceability of its building codes
evaluated.
Sporadic theater inspections
To that end, Williams assigned staffers William J. McAllister and Julius
Lenses to conduct a methodical inspection of
Chicago's theaters. It was the first such
investigation made in several years. As later revealed when mayor
Harrison testified during the Iroquois coroner's
inquest,
understaffing was a problem in the building
department and other city departments. Williams
testified that his department was responsible for
inspecting 9,000 structures. Harrison said that every year
since he'd been mayor, city departments estimated a
need for $4 - 5 million more dollars than the city
could afford and in 1903, even with economizing, the
city was $900,000 in debt. The building department
every year requested funds for thirty-five
inspectors, one for each ward, and never received
it. Staffing shortages in all departments were
worsened by the city's habit of further reducing
expenses by refraining from replacing labor lost
through attrition. Theaters were
among a group of structures that inspectors visited on a catch-as-catch-can basis, sometimes during their off-hours.
Rock and a hard place
Lenses and McAllister's effort exposed a situation worse than Williams or
the mayor had guessed.
The last overhaul in the ordinance had been five
years before, in 1898.
Theaters grandfathered in then, built in the mid-1870s, were now
in poor condition.
The ordinance contained requirements such as
sprinklers, that had never been enforced, leaving
the city vulnerable to lawsuits if it tried to enforce
the sprinkler ordinance at some theaters and not
others. The city's collection of theater
building codes was a leaky bucket that had been
patched and poked for years, in 1903 reaching a
point at which replacement was the only answer.
A lesser man would have maintained the status quo
and collected his salary but Williams seems to have
genuinely wanted to improve the condition of the
city's buildings.
On October 31, 1903, he reported to the media that he'd
sent
a report to the mayor that could result in some theaters losing
their licenses. He speculated that the
city could avoid theater shutdowns if
compromises were made in ordinances and/or theaters. The mayor turned the
report over to the board of aldermen, writing:
"Gentlemen:
'I beg leave to transmit herewith a series of
reports prepared by the commissioners of buildings,
showing the failure of the various theaters in this
city fully to comply with the building ordinances.
'The violations are so numerous and so complete
that it would be impossible for the city
administration to compel observance of the ordinance
without closing practically all the theaters in the
city.
'As a matter of revising the ordinances of the
city relating to theaters and other places of
amusement is now before your committee on judiciary,
I would suggest the reference of the building
commissioner's report to that committee to aid in
the work it has in hand.
Respectfully, Carter H. Harrison, Mayor"
October 1903, two months before the fire.
The city council did nothing.
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According to Harrison, the council's choice was either a.) instruct Williams to
enforce the ordinances as they were presently
written, even though it would mean closing Chicago's
theaters, putting thousands out of work and risking
lawsuits, or b.) revise the ordinances. The
Council chose to send Williams' report to its judiciary committee
for review and instructed the building department to discontinue
enforcement of one of the most conflicting portions
of the code involving proscenium wall construction.
Finger-pointing
After the Iroquois fire, in
interviews with newspaper reporters and at the fire
department inquest, Williams brought up his report
about the theaters. The mayor, in turn,
reminded the city council that he had dutifully passed the Williams
report along to the council just weeks before the fire.
Scapegoating and alliances
Days after the Iroquois disaster, Harrison
threw Williams and fire chief
William Musham if not under the bus at least
near the wheels. Harrison took the cheesy
position that since he had appointed both men
based on pressure/recommendations from others, it wasn't his fault if
they were not competent. He later came to
support Williams as the best building commissioner
the city had ever had and in January 1904 testimony
before the coroner's jury testified that Williams
was handicapped by an inadequate budget, as were
most other Chicago departments, including police and
fire. Williams also alluded to budget problems as a contributing factor,
maintaining that he had twenty inspectors but needed
fifty. Later testimony revealed complications
with that argument. Though
newspapers did not report an estimate of what it
would take to operate the building
department properly, testimony brought
out that the department had originally been budgeted to receive ninety-nine percent
of what it requested for 1903, which would have been
thirty percent more than it received the year
before. A ten-percent budget cut left a budget of $57,000, enough to pay for twenty-five inspectors. Mayor Harrison advised Williams to
cope with that shortage by dismissing the chief inspector and one other
man. The upshot was that in the fourth quarter
of 1903, Williams had more money than his
predecessor but not enough to enforce a hodgepodge of codes in the rapidly growing
city.
January 1, 1904
Police arrested Williams with others involved in the
fire and he spent the next four years in and out of
courtrooms. First came the
fire department inquest, then the coroners
inquest, two
grand juries, various petitions, quashings,
surveys and venue changes.
Williams wasn't stoic but took it better than
many would have. He was the only man in
Chicago government who had stuck his neck out to try
to do something about the dangerous condition of the
city's theaters but was the only one in government
prosecuted for the Iroquois disaster.
In the years after the fire
Political interference with the job of Building Commissioner wasn't as bad
as it was with the fire chief, but it became ugly.
In December 1905, Williams accepted the resignation
of one of the staff members he'd inherited upon
accepting the position, department secretary William
McAllister. McAllister spent as much time on his second job as he did at
the Building Department. Since the second job,
as secretary of the American Turf Association, paid
nearly twice that of his job at the Building
Department, McAllister was happy to resign. A
group calling itself "Citizens Association,"
however, thought Williams should have dismissed
McAllister rather than letting him resign and that
the mayor then, Edward Dunne, should fire Williams.
They sent a letter to the mayor expressing their
views but went to the newspapers before the mayor
received the letter and could respond. A month
later Dunne replaced George Williams with Peter Bartzen as Building Commissioner. A large
group of George's former subordinates and associates
feted him with a dinner and presented an award for
his years of service. It was the second time
that Williams' associates made a public show of
support. He was well-liked and respected by
his peers.
Bio
I need more verification but
George may have been born in 1849 and emigrated
from England to the United States in
1884. His wife, Jane (b.1851), married in 1874, and
two or more of their children followed in 1885. At
least two additional children were born in Illinois.
In 1900 six of their eight children still lived,
some grown, and two under age fourteen. If I have
the right man, the names of some of his children
were Florence, Gertrude, Charles and Bertha. George,
Jane and their grown daughter, Bertha, still lived
in Chicago in 1910. Bertha worked as a clerk at the
telegraph office.
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