- Ferdinand Peck
Ferdinand Wythe Peck (1848-1924) was a wealthy
Chicago ,United States , businessman and philanthropist, best known for financing Chicago's Auditorium Building.He was the youngest son of Mary Kent Peck and Phillip F.W. Peck. The family moved from
Rhode Island to Chicago in the 1830s and made a fortune inreal estate . Peck and his brothers took over the family fortune when their father died, and soon were among the wealthiest families in Chicago.Ferdinand was a civic-minded individual, and was involved in many projects around the city. He was a founding member of the
Illinois humane society , and served on the cityboard of education . He was also a patron of the arts, particularly concerned with making high art available to the working classes. To this end, he organized theChicago Grand Opera Festival in 1885.Out of the Festival grew a desire for a more permanent expression of his ideals. Shortly after the
Haymarket Square riot , he began planning in earnest for what would become the Auditorium Building.To make his idea real, Peck hired architects
Dankmar Adler andLouis Sullivan , who had worked for him previously to prepare the space for the Grand Opera Festival. Peck provided much of the funding and the central vision for the building, and the final design reflected his ideas as well as those of the architects.There is currently an elementary school in southwest Chicago named after him.
External links
* [http://www.illinoishumanesociety.org Illinois Humane Society - serving children]
References
*"Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism" "Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians" 57:2, June 1998.
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
