Greetings, fellow roadies! If you, like we, got an extra hour of sleep in the wee hours of Saturday night/Sunday morning when the clock was officially turned back, then you might want to celebrate the creation of the U.S. Standard Time System. It happened right on Route 66, though it wasn’t going to be Route 66 yet for another 43 years. There’s even a marker at Jackson Boulevard and LaSalle Street to commemorate this.
In the aftermath of the destruction of downtown Chicago by the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, all of the central city was rebuilt, and pretty quickly, too. One of the architects in the city who got nearly more work than he could handle was W.W. Boyington, whose Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station at Chicago Avenue and Michigan Avenue (then Pine Street) were among the very few structures that survived the fire. Among Boyington’s commissions after the fire were two on Jackson Boulevard at LaSalle Street – a prestigious address as the financial district was being rebuilt in that area, and being on a boulevard assured that no commercial traffic or trolley cars would clog the artery. On the northeast corner of the intersection was the Grand Pacific Hotel, a very swanky hostelry that stood across the street from the newly rebuilt Chicago Board of Trade Building, also designed by Boyington (it was a replacement for an earlier hotel that had burned during the fire). Then as now, the CBOT Building had a large town clock by which many in the financial district set their pocket watches. But how was the rest of the city – or, for that matter, the rest of the state or the region – to agree upon the time?
The Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago, 1887, four years after the General Time Convention met
The Curious Traveler's Guide to Route 66 in Metro Chicago 