99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-26- Chicago’s Jailhouse Skyscraper

Episode Date: May 20, 2011

The Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, is a federal jail right in the middle of downtown Chicago. It’s a triangle-shaped skyscraper, 27 stories, with tall, super-narrow, irregularly-spaced windows up and down each wall. The outside walls look like old computer … Continue reading →

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I've stood at this corner a zillion billion times and never looked up at this building. There's the Hancock building. there's the Sears Tower. Yeah, you're supposed to call it the Willis Tower now. Yeah, I'm not gonna call it this. No! And then there's my friend Dan Weissman's new favorite building in the South Loop. A couple days ago, I was at the Cultural Center,

and there's like a map of Chicago architectural landmarks. I mean, it's got zillions of buildings on it. Houses, everything, and this building's not on it. Even if a building is designed by a prominent architect. It's by this guy, Harry Weiss, who made the DC Metro. He's a big deal. And even if that building has only three sides, it's like a triangle from above.

Like a grilled cheese sandwich, cut in half, diagonally. And has these a regularly placed long vertical windowslets. It's just like a punch card or a scantron card. It's still hard to stand out as a skyscraper in Chicago. I remember the first time I noticed it. I was like, what is that building? Someone there was like, oh, it's a jail. My name is Jack Hartray. I was the project manager on the Campbell Correctional Center. Which most people know as the Metropolitan Correctional Center or MCC. It's a federal detention facility. It's where you stay when you're waiting to go up on trial in the federal courthouse, which is like two blocks away. When it was built, nobody much like the idea

of a federal jail downtown. The mayor didn't want this building built in the loop. It's right across the street from a club called the Union League Club, which is one of the kind of fancy elite clubs in the city, and people were like, we don't want prisoners, you know, moaning us from the windows of the jail, and it doesn't seem like it's going to be really good for property values. So there was a lawsuit actually. But to their legal misfortune, they had to bring the student federal court to the only people who were going to

hear the suit. We're also the only people in town who wanted the thing built. They were federal judges. And I think it took them about, you know, 12 minutes to get the thing kicked out of the court. It was impossible to get a judge that wasn't in favor of building the building. The architects in Harry Wies' group were tickled by the prospect as well. Jack Hartray, who worked on the building, said, I think everybody in the office figured that you had a certain number of unindicted criminals in the city and then you had something that had gotten caught. The MCC was just for the people who happened to have gotten caught.

And because the architects took it seriously, that the inmates were innocent until proven guilty. They thought, let's make this as nice as we can. You know, somebody already looked at this problem. How do you make a really small space? Cozy. Harry sort of viewed this from the standpoint of the accommodations on sailboats. The furniture was all built in,

so you could really do pretty nice furniture. Built-in, hardwood furniture has these really clean lines, the bed, there's a desk. I've seen this picture, it's really, you know, it's nice. We built rooms to scale in our office and my children used to come down and take naps and they love the interior space. It was kind of an element pleasant. It was cozy. Yeah.

And those narrow slit windows I mentioned earlier, those are Florida ceiling windows to let in as much light as possible. But they're also built just narrow enough at five inches so that they were within the federal guidelines of the time to not need bars. Sounds really nice. No, it is nice. Yeah nice. Oh it is nice.

Yeah, it is nice. It's not a bad place to stay. I saw an interview with Harry Weasley where he said what he had in mind was like a hotel. Well, we were doing a hotel at the same time and this was better than the hotel, you know, as far as the building furniture and all of that. I showed me the hotel, you know, as far as the the building furniture and all of that. Uh, show me the hotel. Dan has a reporter's tenacity like you wouldn't believe, but he just couldn't get the warden to let him in to the MCC to see if all these beautiful Harry Weas interiors and designs

were still intact. So I called around thinking like who gets inside these places and I ended up talking to a guy named Phil Carigan. If you were to the facility and talk to a random bunch of detainees, they would be a gas that the description or maybe want to go over and clutch a throat. That is not the case. Phil Carigan has been going to the MCC for over 10 years. He has kind of a designated volunteer for the MCC and he goes and visits guys who don't have anybody else to visit them. MCC is not a star.

It's very drab, gunmetal gray. You know, the physical facility is nothing to show off. The cells, the architect described this being really nice, all this kind of hardwood built-in furniture for instance. They're gone. The bumps are steel, two-tier structures, no wood. And do you have sunlight coming in? No.

The windows are generally frosted. It doesn't allow for sunlight to come in. And the place is old, definitely undergone some changes, and none of them have been for beautification. By the time Dan talked with Robert Brogman, who wrote a book about Harry Weas, he was pretty bummed out. There's something about this that seems kind of sad to me. You know, Harry Weiss is a brilliant architect,

and this seems like it's one of his signature projects. His conception is not what exists today. True, but you know, there are Harry Weiss buildings going down all over the country, and that's true of almost all architect of that period. So it was a minor matter that the inside of a place that was never meant to be public has been changed. You know, it is after a lot of hotel.

Even if the warden had let Dan into the MCC, it wasn't the MCC that he wanted to see. For that matter, it wasn't the MCC that Harry Weiss wanted either. This is Chicago. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Dan Weisman and me Roman Mars. This program is made possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. To find out more and see the punch card building for yourself, go to 99%invisible.org. you you