Wikimapia is a multilingual open-content collaborative map, where anyone can create place tags and share their knowledge.

Former Hawthorne Works (Chicago, Illinois)

USA / Illinois / Cicero / Chicago, Illinois
 place with historical importance, brownfield land, historical layer / disappeared object

The Hawthorne Works, in Cicero, Illinois, was a large factory complex built by Western Electric starting in 1905 and operating until 1983. It had 45,000 employees at the height of its operations. Besides telephone equipment, the factory produced a wide variety of consumer products, including refrigerators and electric fans. Hawthorne Works was named for Hawthorne, Illinois, a small town that was later incorporated into Cicero. The facility even contained a private railroad to move shipments through the plant to the nearby Burlington Northern Railroad freight depot. Workers regularly used bicycles for transit within the plant. It was purchased in the mid-1980s by the late Donald L. Shoemaker and replaced with a shopping center. One of the original towers remained at the corner of 22nd Street and Cicero Ave.

In addition to its enormous output of telephone equipment, Hawthorne Works was the site of some well-known industrial studies. The Hawthorne effect is named for the works. North American Quality pioneer Joseph Juran referred to the Hawthorne Works as "the seed bed of the Quality Revolution". The career arcs of other notable quality professionals such as Walter Shewhart and Edward Deming also intersected at the Hawthorne Works.
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   41°50'38"N   87°44'21"W
This article was last modified 7 years ago