Western Electric's Hawthorne Works

(Update: Joe Stupar posted a December, 1924, article about Western Electric making Chicago the "telephone capital of the world." Clifton Linton posted a request for information and got some answers.)

David Mrazek -> Forgotten Chicago

David's comment:

Hawthorne Works - Western Electric. Cover of 1937 Employee Handbook. Period photo of water tower. The white circle in this photo denotes area where present-day photo was taken by me. This photo has the same bittersweet resonance of the gate to the Stockyards.

My Czech grandfather worked here in the early 1900s but it wasn't for him. Though it was wonderful for thousands of others for so many years. Has anyone been to the Hawthorne Museum at Morton College? It looks very cool - worth a visit. How about a Forgotten Chicago field trip?

Michael Maitland's comment on John Smith's posting

A history and eight images

Glen Miller posted
Ogden Avenue bridge over Cicero Ave. with the huge Western Electric Hawthorne Works complex in the background. The house I grew up in is just out of frame in the upper left of the photo. Unknown year. In 1998 National Wrecking Company took down the Ogden Avenue Bridge in Cicero, Illinois. The long bridge spanned over Cicero Avenue and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. The bridge was built in 1940. It grew old and weight restrictions were imposed, the right lane was closed to traffic. It was close to collapsing so it was taken down in 1998 and the current alignment opened in 2001.

David Mrazek -> Forgotten Chicago

Western Electrics Hawthorne Works in Cicero, IL, used to make everything needed by the Bell System. It even had its own railroad --- Manufacturers' Junction. It employed over 40,000 people during its height after World War II. It was closed in 1986 and was torn down in 1994 to make way for strip malls. (Chicago Tribune) Quoting the Tribune's description of the discovery of the Hawthorne Effect:

It was a world center for industrial science, the site of the pioneering Hawthorne Studies that had a long-term impact on business management.
The studies, led by Harvard professor Elton Mayo between 1924 and 1933, showed that employees work harder when their bosses pay more attention to them and communicate with them.
One study turned up a paradox: that if supervisors increased lighting in the plant, employees would work harder, but complain. If they dimmed the lights in response to the complaints, they would work still harder.
A conclusion: Workers liked the feeling that management was listening to them.

Gregory Moore posted
Here is another of the Mega Size Chicago Buildings that are gone: HAWTHORNE WORKS. Located on 22nd Street (Cermak Road) and Cicero Avenue. This was the home of Western Electric. Most of the telephones (since 1923) were built at this location. It employed 45,000 people. During World World II it supported the war effort building aircraft equipment. It had it's own in-house fire station, police department, restaurants, places to sleep and shower and shopping stores...a city in a building. It was torn down in 1983 and is now a shopping center.
[This view is looking Southeast.]

Joey BagOdonuts posted
Charlene Goodman: I started at Illinois Bell in 60 Western made all the phones for the whole country The cruise on the Eastland was in every year picnic for all of the Western electric employees.
Eddie G Hoffmann: Dad retired from the Wire Mill in the mid 70's. [I'm surprised they still made wire there in the 70's because by then they had built the plant north of Atlanta to make cables.]
Gary Marek: Delivered steel there in the late 70’s.
Ron Atanus: 40,000 employees during WWII.
Kathleen Brennan Mammoser: I studied this in management class in college.   The Hawthorne Effect is the inclination of people who are the subjects of an experimental study to change or improve the behavior being evaluated only because it is being studied and not because of changes in the experiment parameters or stimulus.
Frank Matarrese: Made communication equipment for WWI with 99.9% statistical quality assurance rates headed by William Deming who also taught gambling statistics to folks at the Hawthorne Hotel where he stayed TDY.
Cindy Janecko Witkowsky: Back in the day, just about everyone, at least on the southwest side of Chicago, either worked at Western Electric or at Sears on Homan Avenue. At least one family member of every family I knew......a father or mother, or aunt or uncle or grandparent. My father spent his entire working career at Western Electric in Cicero and then transferred to the Merchandise Mart, and then to Rolling Meadows IL until he retired. HUGE Employer with great benefits.
Mike Matz: In its heyday the employed 25000. They had a power plant that produced all of the power the plant needed and even had a way to provide power to some of the surrounding communities in an emergency. Manufactured Step by Step Central Office switching gear and in the early days of Electronic Switching they produced No. 101 ESS (PBX), No. 1ESS and eventually NO. 2 ESS. I was involved in the factory testing of the very first NO. 2 ESS that went into the field. They had a foundry that would melt metal and make castings for various frame assemblies, they also had a wire mill that created paper covered wire as well as plastic. Amazing to watch the 250 lb. ingots of copper heated in an induction furnace and successively run thru smaller snd smaller dies until it got down to the required gauge for telephone cable. Very interesting place to work. I was the youngest supervisor in the plant at the ripe age of 21.
Greg Stepanek: At its apex, Western Electric, or "The Western" as it was popularly called, employed close to 46,000 in shifts at its Hawthorn plant, which stretched along Cicero Avenue from Cermak to 25th, and Cicero east to the belt line railroad tracks, and still further east in a building along Cermak. The main building was six stories, not counting the tower on the corner of Cicero & Cermak. They were the makers of the Bell telephone, and supplied essentially the entire United States. They also were ahead of their time in providing benefits to their employees, not because they had to, but because they wanted to and actually cared about their employees' welfare. They had their hospital, post office, and even athletic field. They had summer outings free for their employees and families. People really WANTED to jet a job at Western Electric. For many years, it was a good, stable, well-paying job. Cicero and Berwyn, as well as Little Village owe a great deal to Western Electric for their existence. The neighborhoods essentially built up around the Western.
David James: Dave Lytle that's only the commercial side, and that was a small portion. In WW2 they were doing electro optic and then later radar slaved aiming systems for anti aircraft guns and aerial gunnery. They produced wire by the millions of yards, copper, zinc, aluminum. Tactical field commo gear. They were the primary developers of the Nike Ajax and Herc missiles that used to be based in and near Chicago and every other major city and military installation in the US. Those were excellent jobs for one of those employers you'd think would never go under, but kinda did (I think Bell Systems took them over).
Jennifer Rafter Shonfelt: They tore that down?

Dennis DeBruler commented on Jennifer's comment

Everything except the water tower (to the left of the "Dollar Tree" marker). The comments about Sam's Club now being there are wrong. The Hawthorne Works were north of Ogden. The clock tower would have been at the corner near the Chipotle marker.

https://www.google.com/.../@41.8592575,-87.../data=!3m1!1e3

During the war effort, it helped develop and manufacture RADAR. A comment by Yaj Srednuas said it closed in 1983 and was razed in 1986. But note the previous posting has the dates 1986 and 1994. Western Electric was also a pioneer in audio reproduction. They provided the audio for many B&W movies including the first --- Jazz Singer. I think the comment about "most of the telephones" is also incorrect. WE had built a plant in Indianapolis, IN, dedicated to phone manufacture. Cable manufacturing moved to a plant north of Atlanta, GA. Columbus OH built a lot of the relay-based switching equipment. Oklahoma City was built to make the more modern computer-based switching equipment. Bell Labs, which had primarily been in New Jersey, opened a major location in Naperville, IL in the late 1960s called Indian Hill to be closer to the Hawthorne Works. (Only the white building in the middle existed in 1973. The glass building and parking garages in front was the original parking lot. The black building and parking lots was just grass. I believe the little wood building off the path to the retention pond is used for measuring the electromagnetic radiation of equipment. They also had a special room in the main building for measuring radiation.) The thought was that this would help transition development to manufacture. But, in practice, Bell Labbers worked with Oklahoma City instead of Hawthorne. Indian Hill is where I was hired in 1973. IH specialized in developing computer-based switching equipment. Over the decades that work evolved from hardware development to software development. The IH location is now owned by Alcatel-Lucent, but, as of my retirement in 2014, it was still mainly a "software factory" to support telephony systems, including cellular and packetized voice. I believe the Indianapolis plant closed. The Atlanta area plant has evolved from making copper cables to making fiber-optic cables. The largest copper cables had 3,600 pairs.

Eddie G Hoffmann -> Forgotten Chicago

Eddie's comment:

Western Electric, Hawthorne Plant, Rod Mill; Here is an exceedingly rare picture from what once was very much a Hawthorne landmark, the looping mill. The men working here needed nerves of steel as "catchers" to guide the orange hot copper to various draws. My father was one of these men.

The link in the comments to the Hawthorn Museum at Morton College was broke, but I was able to find a couple more: history and museum. The WesternElectricCo site says RADAR was developed circa 1918 and WE also worked on night vision gear. I'm disappointed that he choose to Copyright photos that he took out of a waste bin.

Edward Kwiatkowski shared Mike Pender's photo
April '86 Western Electric Hawthorne works before demolition.
Cicero and Cermak looking S.E..

A Flickr view of the main building. There is a sequence of three photos on Lightbox.

Below are some comments on the posting to the right.

Jimmy Boyce Anton Tonchev, The only tower that remains is closer to the freight line between Cicero & Kostner. This tower in the picture would not be the same one.

Chuck Edmonson comment

It sounds like the tower that was saved was just a water tank. Dave Gudewicz commented "The tower's "look" was in keeping with the motif of the rest of the campus, although I don't know how many other buildings had turrerts. I guess they had the $$ and the architect had the notion, so there it is. There are a number of brick towers in the Chicagoland area's industrial buildings that hid (unsightly) water tanks. Here's an example of another ornate brick tower hiding a water tank. I believe this structure is on Pulaski in Avondale. Originally it was an envelope manufacturing company. Photo taken during a FC tour of Avondale a few years ago."

Jeff Nichols posted

Update: Jeff's comment "Western Electric, 2200 S. Cicero, undated. University of Illinois at Chicago"

Anthony Gorss My high school teacher and I went there in the late 80's to strip out anything we could for the electrics lab at MEHS. Lot's of telephone stuff, and some really cool stuff that would fetch a good price today. Shame it was torn down, for a now questionable shopping plaza.

1938 Aerial Photo from ILHAP

I added a red rectangle to indicate the location of the water tower. The shadow confirms it is the tower. While researching this, I was amazed by how much industry used to be in Cicero along Cicero Avenue and the MJ+BRC railroads between the CB&Q on the south and B&OCT (Wisconsin Central) on the north. WE was on the south end.

1938 Aerial Photo from ILHAP

I spent quite a bit of time looking for the Sanborn Map because it was in the Chicago Volumes. As an experiment, I include it below as "Original Size."

Sanborn Map, 1951 series, Vol. 20, Sheet 136.

Riley Franson posted

Caption says: the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric Company. The photo was taken on October 15, 1957.

Robert Leffingwell I remember the 24 hour bars in the area.

Brian Brown Moved us all out there from Pilsen. [I didn't even know Western Electric had an earlier plant in downtown Chicago. That creates another research item.]

Dan Adams My Great Uncle Joe was a Western Electric employee, and worked there. Both he and my Great Aunt Anna were on the ship when it capsized. Both survived, and really didn't want to discuss their obviously horrendous experience. He was transferred to a different plant in South Bend, IN in the 1930's. [And a South Bend plant.]

Rimas Novickis my lithuanian immigrant dad put in time at western along with 6-7 of the other huge manufacturing plants which ringed the town of cicero, including hotpoint, sunbeam, kropp forge...and close to 10 years spent at taylor forge north on cicero avenue which was prob one 1/4 the size of western's main plant ^ this one, but still huge.

3 shifts, round the clock almost all of them - one reason why cicero had so many 4am (or later) liquor licenses.

Dan Adams: I've heard about Cicero's reputation as a nightclub scene. Now I know the reason why!

Rimas Novickis calumet city was in that league too, prob because of IT's proximity to the 5-6 steel mills working 3 shifts that were all along that IL / IN border.

Glen Miller posted

Hawthorne plant of Western Electric Company. The photo was taken on October 15, 1957. I grew up about 4 blocks away from here.

Edward Kwiatkowski shared

Update: in 1958 you could at least choose a color other than black. Note that touch-tone did not yet exist.

Hawthorne Works Museum and Archives  added

Artifact of the Month: The Western Electric Model 302 telephones were introduced in 1937 and manufactured at the Hawthorne Works. The Henry Dreyfuss-designed deskset combined the ringer unit and speaker circuits within a single zinc alloy housing. Previous Western Electric telephones had required a separate ringer box.
World War II forced sharp reductions in the production of home telephones, but beginning in late 1945, the Hawthorne Works rushed to meet a backlog of two million orders. Western Electric acquired extra space in the former Studebaker plant on Archer Avenue, and by March 1946, assemblers had turned out one hundred thousand Model 302s.
In 1950, Western Electric rolled out a new model telephone and a new manufacturing plant. Henry Dreyfuss' famed Model 500 rolled off the assembly lines in Indianapolis for the next thirty-three years.

I still have a couple of Model 500s, one of which has a dial.

Update:

Donald McLean's comment on Antonio's posting

Lance Grey's comment on Antonio's posting
Viewed South from the Railroad embankment @ Cermak, in 1910

Lance Grey's comment on Antonio's posting
Cicero @ 24th looking north, as posted to FC last November.

North and Central posted
Western Electric Hawthorne Works plant. One of the factories mentioned in North and Central.

Craig Holmberg commented on the above posting

Pete Kastanes updated
Here is a photo of the Western Electric Company at night at Hawthorn Works. Once located at W Cermak Rd and S Cicero Ave in Cicero, IL.

 

JEFFREY LINDMARK posted
Western Electric

Tess Dennis Schlagheck: https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781467111355/...

Edward Kwiatkowski shared

Eddie G Hoffmann commented on Pete's update
Northside of Ogden in the Rod Mill, Wire Mill and Cable Plant is where the heavy work was done.

Eddie G Hoffmann commented on his comment
From copper bars to finished cables.

 

Sean Brady posted

View of the Western Electric Hawthorne Plant Assembly Floor, showing the largest 125 volt direct current generator ever built, capacity 10,000 amperes, operating at 100 R.P.M.

1908

Will Kalman: 125V * 10,000A = 1.25MW = 1,976 horsepower @ 100 RPM = 103,308 lb-ft of torque!

All of that ignoring all the usual losses, just for fun.

Ross Gardiner: The brush angle trimmer wheel caught my eye. A great many lifts of that period were DC. Melbourne, Australia had DC reticulation to support the lift installations and a dedicated DC substation full of huge old mercury arc rectifiers into the mid nineteen-eighties.

Christopher Camalick: Good thing copper was cheap as hell back then, multiple huge busbars would be needed between it and its load. We had similar loads in our rolling drives in the steel mills, but the voltages were 600-750 Volts typically. There was a lot of 250 for cranes and essentials but nothing less than that.

Marty Edelen: Christopher Camalick My former work location was The South Louisville Shops of the L&N RR.

The plant was completed in 1905.

A steam power house produced compressed air, steam for the buildings and two-wire direct current (240V) which was used all over the property.

All the large cranes, transfer tables, machine tools and incandescent lighting used this DC.

Sizable conductors and buss bars were all over.

AC power from the local utility did not come on to the property until 1937.

Years later, AC/DC substations were installed to replace the power house’s DC.

Most of the lighting by then was AC.

Greg Stonerock: LOOK at the Bottom Right... Is there one or two people there???🤔🤔🤔

David Firth: The 1893 world’s fair in Chicago was lit by AC furnished by Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. Power plant was located at Niagra Falls.

Edward Kwiatkowski posted
Demolition of the old Western Electric Company building on South Cicero Avenue and West Cermak Road. Cicero Illinois. Jan 1987.

WE's Kansas City Works made vacuume tubes until 2002. It has links to a lot of WE history.

Hawthorne, Its Life and People.