Chicago’s “Skyline of Signs”

Abstract

In the November 1933 issue of Signs of the Times—the leading trade publication of the outdoor advertising industry—Walter D. Krupke, a general sales manager for the Chicago-based Federal Electric Company, heralded “Chicago’s Million-Dollar Skyline of Signs.”(1) The skyline to which Krupke referred to was the particular stretch visible from the recently opened Outer Drive (now Lake Shore Drive) that connected the South Side through the city, passing the exposition site for “A Century of Progress,” and up to the North Side. This stretch was anchored by the dramatic frontage of tall buildings, forming a street wall on Michigan Avenue and facing the open expanse of Grant Park. While these new skyscrapers seemed to define the image of Chicago through a rising skyline, for Krupke, the architecture was secondary, mere support for giant electric advertising displays, also known as illuminated spectaculars. These outdoor advertising structures—and the potential of their visibility—played as vital a role in representing civic progress and urban advancement as any building in this same aerial territory. They signaled not only the city’s commercial vitality as a growing consumer market and burgeoning metropolis, but also a cultural vitality, prompting a writer in 1930 to discern the parallel, “The improvement and expansion of the Outdoor Advertising medium, in Chicago, is commensurate with the progress of the city.”2 In effect, architecture became a backdrop, overtaken by outdoor advertising structures that marked Chicago’s modernity through a “skyline of signs.”

1. Krupke, “Chicago’s Million-Dollar Skyline of Signs,” 19, 53.