(Above) Clarence Ekstrom, fourth from right, in dark suit, led a crew of McHugh Construction Company employees as they built Marina City in the early 1960s.

Left to right... Ed Wachholz, engineer (Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory) Al Henry, field engineer Don Reiser, excavating superintendent John Barnett, ironworker superintendent Pat Verley, carpenters foreman (for office building) Bob Taylor, labor foreman Ed Schreck, carpenter L.J. Schreck, carpenters superintendent Al Specius, timekeeper Clarence Ekstrom, project manager Chip Zapinski, project engineer Leigh Brunson, general superintendent Homer Welker, carpenters superintendent

Long days. Dangerous work. But between the groundbreaking ceremony on November 22, 1960, and the commemorative ceremony exactly two years later, the Herculean task to build America’s tallest apartment building kept on schedule.

Founded in 1897 by an Irish bricklayer, James McHugh Construction Company was known for its elaborate masonry work by the 1920s. In time, the company would build Arlington Park racetrack, Goodman Theatre, Water Tower Place, and Trump International Hotel & Tower, but Marina City would baptize the mostly Catholic, all-union construction crew of McHugh.

As general contractor, McHugh would use 16,000 tons of concrete to sculpt two 65-story residential towers, a 300,000 square foot commercial platform, a 16-story office building, and later a 100,000 square foot theater.

Other companies would handle plumbing and electrical work – and making their schedules fit with McHugh’s was left to a 40-year-old project manager, Clarence Ekstrom. Born in 1920, Ekstrom served in World War II on the U.S.S. San Diego, a highly decorated light cruiser, U.S.S. George F. Elliott, a troop carrier, and later on a submarine, U.S.S. Sea Cat. When the war ended in 1945, he went from the Navy to the University of Illinois, studying architectural engineering.

Jobs in plumbing, heating, and sheet metal taught him the inner workings of building construction, and in 1954 he was hired by McHugh as a field engineer. He stood out for his project estimating ability and by 1960, when McHugh was less the corporation it is today and more of a family business on the south side of Chicago, still being run by its founder, James D. McHugh, Ekstrom was named project manager of the Marina City job.

“When we got involved with Marina Towers,” recalled Ekstrom in 2010, “we didn’t bid on the job. Because [McHugh] was a union organization at the beginning. And so they had a meeting with us. And we told them that we would work with them for cost.”

McHugh started on the project before plans for Marina City were entirely finished, and right from the beginning there were challenges.

The hardest part, according to Ekstrom, were the forms that contained the concrete while it hardened. The unusual shapes required the forms to be made from fiberglass, assembled at McHugh’s plant near South Cottage Grove Avenue & East 79th Street and transported to the site.

Tower cranes – a vertical mast connected to a horizontal jib, now common at construction sites – were new in the early 1960s. Even Willis Tower, completed in 1974, was constructed using derricks, a lifting device composed mainly of a pole connected to lines that move it in various directions. But that would not work with the circular towers. A Linden tower crane (seen at left) with a 100-foot radius, raised hydraulically, had to be brought over from Denmark.

Daily routine

The workday started for Ekstrom at 4 a.m. By 8 or 9 p.m., after meetings with other contractors such as Sievert Electric and plumbers at Thomas H. Litvin Company, a schedule for the next day was worked out.

“We had nothing to do [directly] with the plumbers or electricians,” says Ekstrom. “We didn’t have the contract for the whole project. That’s why I had to put it together. I had to coordinate plumbers and electricians and all the other trades. Mesh with their schedule.”

Offices for McHugh were on two floors of storefronts along Kinzie Street, which bordered the north end of the construction site. With the site’s ground level along the riverfront to the south, Ekstrom would walk down from Kinzie Street between the Chicago Varnish Company Building, now Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse, and a four-story warehouse building for Hertz Rent-A-Car, now the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

(Above) Looking through the site from the south, buildings north of the property are visible in 1961, including the Chicago Varnish Company Building at left. (Left) 1934 photo of the building from which the Marina City construction site was managed. It is the white building at left, next to the Chicago Varnish Company Building. Ekstrom says he would walk into the building from Kinzie Street and down stairs, which would place him at the same level as Marina City’s marina.

Working with the architect

Marina City architect Bertrand Goldberg met with Ekstrom every day to make sure plans and construction matched.

“We had a good rapport with him,” Ekstrom remembers. “We worked together to make sure it would be a positive approach. We met quite a bit.” Goldberg’s biggest concerns were the curves and columns of his design, created from concrete using special fiberglass forms, work that L.J. Schreck supervised. Goldberg “was happy when he saw the forms.” (Right) Ekstrom with Goldberg on Wacker Drive in front of the east tower on September 15, 1961.

He says Goldberg was realistic about schedules. Most of the work was in getting the cement to the site from a Material Service Corporation plant in northern Michigan, made into concrete and poured into the forms, and working toward a goal of building the east tower in one year.

“I had to keep making sure that there were no breakdowns because this was a full year, winter and summer. And make sure the city helped us to get the barges, the sand to make the concrete, the aggregate.”

Shortcuts in safety

While the work was often repetitious – apartments, for the most part, were all the same – it was dangerous and unencumbered by safety regulations of today.

“We had no barriers on,” says Ekstrom, referring to anything that would catch falling tools or personnel. “We were fortunate. I mean, we would never finish the building if it was done today because we did shortcuts in safety.”

Before giving the approval for the crane operator to start, Ekstrom himself would climb up a tower on a ladder to check the wind. This was important because the wind could – and did at least once – pick up a form and deposit it in the Chicago River.

“We had no fear,” says Ekstrom. “I used to go up into the tower myself all the way up to 600 feet. I’d walk up ladders. One time, we covered the elevator shaft with a plank and something was wrong with it and the plank broke. That’s when I almost fell. It was scary.”

For most of 1962, with the first tenants moving into the east tower, workers under the direction of Lee Brunson focused on the west tower.

“We didn’t start the west tower until we knew that everything was functioning right.”

24-year career with McHugh

Ekstrom, who currently lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and celebrated his 90th birthday on April 7, 2010, worked for McHugh from 1954 to 1978. His birthday cake was a 25-inch chocolate replica of Marina City, suggesting his years building Marina City were his favorite.

When he looks at Marina City today, he sees achievement, an understanding of which was not apparent at the time, so focused they were on the details. The effort to put it together – on time, with no computers, mobile phones, or other conveniences of today – remains a memorable experience that helped him with larger projects that followed. (Left) Clarence Ekstrom in 2010 on Wacker Drive in front of Marina City.