2. Corporate Restructuring

"I [Richard Buckminster Fuller] herewith tender my resignation as President of the Stockade Building System, Inc., to take effect immediately."

-- February 10, 1927, Richard Buckminster Fuller to Stockade Building Systems Board of Directors. Cited in Becoming Bucky Fuller by Loretta Lorance, MIT Press 2009, p. 41

Suicide Bridge, Lincoln Park, Chicago.

"Now came the great crisis in his life. No job, no money, infant daughter, betrayed by people he had trusted. He walked over to the lake and thought about suicide."

- Becoming Bucky Fuller by Loretta Lorance p. 210, quoting 'Letter and Essay to Joe Bryant'

In the 1960's Bucky recalled he was "standing by the lake on a jump-or-think basis." If he was thinking of committing suicide, swimming in from lakeside would probably not do it: one would have to jump from Suicide Bridge.

 

High Bridge, aka Suicide Bridge

Suicide was common in Chicago. It rose throughout the 1920's reaching a peak in 1929, the year of the stock market crash. Lincoln Park was associated with suicide, due to its infamous Suicide Bridge. Adam Selzer tells the story in his Mysterious Chicago blog:

In 1898, Chicagoan police officers who patrolled Lincoln Park at night had plenty of stories about running into ghosts while making their rounds. However, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them to blame the fact that the park had been a cemetery in recent memory (and still had plenty of bodies buried below the ground). In fact, it was generally agreed that the ghosts were the unfortunates who had ended their life at Suicide Bridge.

View from the bridge, c. 1899

In 1894 a high bridge – 42 feet above the water – was erected as a sight-seeing bridge over the lagoon that runs along Lake shore Drive. On a clear day, you could see the stockyards and Jackson park from the bridge. It attracted plenty of weirdos – one elderly woman was known to go there daily to get as drunk as humanly possible. Another man would often go to whistle at the moon in a strange, eerie tone that scared the crap out of the cops. But it became most famous as a place to commit suicide. By 1900, kids around Chicago were superstitious about it, telling friends to “stay away from suicide bridge.”

No one knows how many people ended their lives with a leap from the bridge before it was closed in 1919, but it was probably between 50 and 100 (the number who came intending the jump, but didn’t (or survived) was estimated as being in the hundreds). It was so popular a destination for suicide that even people NOT seeking to die by drowning came to the bridge – one man hanged himself from the edge, and another went there to shoot himself.

Newspapers came up with wild headlines about it, including:

 

Chicago Tribune, January 14, 1909

Woman Leaps Off High Bridge: Mrs. Eliza Raven Tries to Commit Suicide Because of Failing Eyesight. She Will Recover. Made desperate by the fear of blindness, Mrs. Eliza Haven. 30 years of age, jumped from the high bridge over the Lincoln Park lagoon yesterday afternoon.

Girl Seeks Death In Lagoon, Ends in Cell In Station. Miss Alice Witt, 21 years old, had her mind all made up for suicide yesterday afternoon, but all she succeeded in doing was to get a good wetting and be locked up at the Hudson street station on a charge of disorderly conduct.

Policeman Spoils a Suicide: Interferes When Fascinated Crowd in Lincoln Park is Waiting for Man to Kill Self. Patrolman Charles Wilson of the North Halsted street police station, however, immediately became active. He ran up to where Meyer was standing and seized him just as he seemed to have made up his mind to try drowning in preference to using the razor.

Jumps from Bridge To Lagoon: Says he Tried Suicide for Fun

Doom High Suicide Bridge: Lincoln Park Commissioners to Spoil Convenience for Those Contemplating Self-Destruction (note: this was in 1909, and nothing appears to have come of it. When it was closed a decade later, it was due to poor condition).

So when Bucky wanted to dramatize his emotional state, he pictured himself standing on suicide bridge in Lincoln Park by the shore of Lake Michigan, although the bridge was torn down and gone.

References

Top photo, postcard of Suicide Bridge. Public Domain.

[1] Author and historian Adam Selzer operates Mysterious Chicago Tours. He is the author of several books, such as Ghosts of Chicago (Llewelyn 2013), Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the US Film Industry (University of Columbia Press 2015), The Smart Aleck’s Guide to American History (Random House 2015), Ghosts of Lincoln (Llewelyn 2015), and countless articles, blog posts, and stories. See http://mysteriouschicago.com/

 [2] Vital Statistics by Louis Dublin, American Journal of Public Health p. 969