The Sherman House Hotel that stood in 1926 was the fourth structure of the same name to grace Chicago’s Loop. The first, built in 1836, was demolished to make way for the second. That building, in turn, was a casualty of the Great Chicago Fire that consumed some 3.3 miles of the city. The one that replaced it ultimately suffered the same fate as the first.
Construction began on the fourth and final version in 1910. The 12-story, 757-room hotel was a testament to modernity, a steel-frame structure that blended in seamlessly with the early skyscrapers the had begun to populate the Chicago skyline in decades prior.
For its 20 years, the hotel served as the headquarters for the Cook County Democratic Party. President Calvin Coolidge and the First Lady were the inaugural guests of a luxury suite atop the building. AM radio station WLS began broadcasting from the hotel in 1924, and 14 years later, the building played host to the NFL draft.
But it was the hotel’s restaurant, the College Inn, that proved its true cultural epicenter. Band leader Isham Jones bucked the trend of quiet hotel bars of era, instead embracing the vibrant and raucous jazz scene that provided a soundtrack for a city deep in the throes of a nationwide prohibition. Big Band staples Jimmy Dorsey and Woody Herman performed at the venue, and years later it played host to a young singer named Frank Sinatra.
In 1926, Fats Waller kicked off a residency at the hotel. From there, the 21-year-old pianist from Harlem took the Windy City by storm. A pioneering musician, prolific songwriter and consummate entertainer, Waller had made his earliest recordings some four years prior, but it was his gig playing night after night at the Sherman that cemented his status in the Chicago jazz scene.
After one successful show, a car pulled up alongside the young musician, as he was leaving venue. “Come on, Fats, we want to take you somewhere,” one of the four passengers told Waller, according to an interview with his son several decades later. The mood shifted quickly. The cordial – if forceful – invite grew more sinister, as a gun was drawn and Waller was blindfolded and forced into the back of the car.
“Whose wife am I going out with now, that someone’s going to do this to me?” Waller’s son recounts his father’s inner-monologue.
When the blindfold was finally removed, Waller was seated at a piano in front of a crowd at the Hawthorne Hotel, some eight miles away. The building served as the headquarters for Al Capone, who’d risen to the ranks of mafia boss a year prior. In September, the North Side Gang would open fire on the hotel’s restaurant with Thompson submachine guns, in hopes of killing the embattled boss.
It would be another 21 years before syphilis did the job armies of gangsters had failed to complete.
But tonight, the Hawthorne was home to a command performance by one of jazz music’s rising stars. Capone stood directly in front of Waller. “Come on, play for us, Fats,” the mob boss told the “surprise guest” of his 27th birthday party.
Party guests shoved a $100 bill for every song they requested. The musician was plied with food and top shelf champagne during a party that dragged out over three days. It was a rare and entirely involuntary brush with the underworld for the law-abiding son of a New York City Baptist pastor.
When the party finally ended, Waller once again found himself in the company of the same four men in one of Capone’s cars – this time in a limo, thousands of dollars richer than he was the evening he’d exited the Sherman.
Sources:
Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend By Deirdre Bair
Fats Waller - This Joint is Jumpin' (documentary, 1985)
Sherman House IV https://chicagology.com/skyscrapers/skyscrapers082/