26-Feb-16 – He led a fearless team of construction workers who built one of the architectural and engineering wonders of the 20th Century but more importantly, he would want us to tell you, it was completed on schedule.

Clarence Ekstrom, project manager for James McHugh Construction Company on its job building Marina City, died Sunday in Hendersonville, North Carolina, of natural causes. He was 95 years old.

By the time he was 40 years old, Ekstrom had served in the South Pacific in World War II, studied architectural engineering at the University of Illinois, and worked at jobs in plumbing, heating, and sheet metal that taught him the inner workings of building construction. As a field engineer for McHugh, he stood out for his project estimating ability.

When McHugh was hired in 1960 to take 16,000 tons of concrete and sculpt a 300,000 square foot commercial platform, a 16-story office building, and the tallest apartment buildings in the United States, the job of making schedules fit was given to Ekstrom.

He not only had to keep McHugh on schedule but other contractors as well. He had daily meetings with the architect, Bertrand Goldberg. (Left) Ekstrom and Marina City architect Bertrand Goldberg.

He inspected caissons, made sure equipment did not break, that cement got to the site from a plant in northern Michigan, that barges carrying sand for the cement got there, too. He did all this without computers or mobile phones.

The workday started at 4 a.m. Offices for McHugh were on two lower floors of storefronts along Kinzie Street, between where Harry Caray’s Italian Steakhouse and Museum of Broadcast Communications are now located. By 8 or 9 p.m., after meetings with electricians, plumbers, and other tradesmen, a schedule for the next day was worked out.

(Right) Building Marina City’s east tower in 1961. The building in which the construction office was located is visible in distance at upper left, next to the red and white structure on the corner that is now Harry Caray’s. The building at upper right, with a Hertz sign partially visible, is now Museum of Broadcast Communications. Photo by Portland Cement Association.

“At first, I was getting complaints here and there, and I just sort of worked them out,” he recalled in 2010. “But it was repetition. It’s like playing an instrument. It’s hard at first and as the building progressed, everything was working together.”

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.

(Left) Marina City’s distinctive balconies take shape in this frame from This Is Marina City, a film by Arthur Mandler that was commissioned by Portland Cement Association.

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. There were no barriers to catch falling tools or personnel.

“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.”

Before giving the approval for the crane operator to start, Ekstrom would climb 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.

As residents started to move in to Marina City’s east tower in 1962, the work focused on the west tower, then the office building that is now Hotel Chicago, and then the 100,000 square foot theater that is now House of Blues.

Before he retired in 1978 after 24 years with McHugh, Ekstrom worked on projects even bigger than Marina City but none that were more important to him. When he turned 90, his birthday cake was a 25-inch chocolate replica of Marina City.

(Right) Ekstrom in front of Marina City in 2010. Photo by Steven Dahlman.

During his 37 years in North Carolina, Ekstrom was a Sunday School teacher for a Baptist church and traveled internationally with his wife, Lois, who died in 2009.

He had two daughters, Carol Stricker of Chicago and Judith Shaw, who lives in Arkansas, a son, Paul Ekstrom, three sisters, three brothers, five grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews.

A funeral service with military honors is scheduled for March 5 in Hendersonville.

(Below) Ekstrom with family and friends at his 90th birthday party in 2010.